Executive Overview
In the landscape of contemporary life writing, few essays achieve the delicate balance of intimacy, sharp sociological observation, and psychological honesty found in Jane Gillette’s memoir, Old Friends. Published in The Missouri Review’s vibrant online prose anthology, BLAST, Gillette’s essay interrogates the mechanisms through which we catalog, preserve, and occasionally misremember the people who shape our formative and enduring years.
Centering on the life, death, and complex legacy of a man named Steve—a tax law professor, anti-war activist, and polymathic fixture of Washington, D.C.’s intellectual underground—Gillette constructs a portrait that deliberately subverts the eulogistic consensus. Where a formal memorial service celebrated Steve as a dedicated public intellectual, political campaigner, and legal scholar, Gillette’s memoir introduces a vastly different figure: an idiosyncratic confidant who ordered endless takeout from the Yenching Palace, bought Swedish meatballs at IKEA for elite D.C. gatherings, shared advice on surviving transatlantic air travel, and perhaps maintained a clandestine connection to the Secret Service.
Gillette, an acclaimed short-story writer and recipient of both the Lawrence Foundation Prize and an O. Henry Prize, brings her fiction writer’s eye for detail, pacing, and emotional subtext to this memoir. By contrasting public mythologies with private realities, Old Friends explores how interpersonal connections adapt to geographic displacement, changing marital statuses, and the inexorable march of mortality. This feature-length review and contextualization examines the architecture of Gillette’s essay, tracing its narrative chronology, evaluating its stylistic contributions to the memoir genre, and positioning its themes within the broader framework of contemporary literary nonfiction.
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Detailed Chronology: A Tapestry of Decades
1. The Crucible of Academia: Washington, D.C. in the 1970s and 1980s
The narrative roots of Old Friends plunge deep into the intellectual ecosystem of Washington, D.C., during a period of profound social and political upheaval. Gillette, then an adjunct English instructor who would eventually abandon academic literary criticism, found herself embedded in "The Committee." This informal collective met every Friday at 5:00 p.m. at The Tombs, a local bar. Composed largely of tenure-track and tenured professors from Classics, English, Philosophy, and Economics—alongside Gillette—The Committee functioned as both a social release valve and a crucible for institutional critique.
Against the backdrop of anti-apartheid shanty-town protests on campus and the lingering trauma of the Vietnam War moratoriums, Gillette and Steve’s paths intertwined. Although Steve’s official biography positioned him as an earnest professor teaching tax law and organizing academic penance courses on South Africa, Gillette’s early interactions reveal a man of playful contradictions. Their relationship during this era was defined by intellectual parity, shared literary passions—ranging from The Charterhouse of Parma to The Magic Mountain—and the mutual solace of being platonic confidants while deeply invested in external romantic lives.
2. The Midlife Pivot: Divorces, Phone Marathons, and Transatlantic Commutes
As the decades progressed, geographic and domestic shifts transformed the dynamic between Gillette and Steve. Both experienced major life disruptions: Steve’s marriage to his first wife dissolved, followed by the end of Gillette’s marriage to her first husband. These parallel heartbreak narratives catalyzed a profound deepening of their friendship.
Gillette recounts how Steve would call nearly every night to dissect the complexities of his separation from his wife, Gaylord, and his subsequent romance with a woman involved in South African affairs who eventually relocated to London. These nightly exchanges established a rhythm of intimacy that spanned international time zones. Steve offered pragmatic advice on surviving monthly transatlantic flights between Washington and London—prescribing a strict regimen of red wine, white wine, and immediate sleep—while Gillette provided a steadfast sounding board.
During this middle chapter, Steve’s domestic life was a revolving door of formal dinners with influential D.C. figures, everyday meals shared with children, and endless deliveries from the Yenching Palace on Connecticut Avenue. It was also an era of practical solidarity: when Gillette faced a harrowing stalking incident from an ex-lover, Steve and his well-connected lawyer friend Daryll orchestrated a quiet, highly effective intervention. When Gillette finalized her divorce on November 9, 1989—the exact day the Berlin Wall fell—she and Steve celebrated over lunch.
3. Geographic Reorientation and the Arrival of Laura
The turn of the millennium introduced physical distance. In 2000, Gillette relocated to the West Coast with a new husband, transitioning her daily proximity to Steve into long-distance check-ins and infrequent visits. Around this same period, Steve entered a stable, deeply fulfilling relationship with Laura, a law professor at New York University.
With Steve’s emotional life stabilized by a happy marriage, the nightly marathon phone calls naturally subsided. Their interactions became punctuated by mutual travel milestones, including envious observations of each other’s stays in Venice and Nantucket. Yet, even in this era of settled domesticity, Steve retained an aura of unpredictability. Gillette recalls bizarre anomalies, such as an evening during President Clinton’s second inauguration when Steve and a mysterious associate named Carl used Gillette’s house to change clothes—an episode later complicated by whispered rumors at a party that Steve may have maintained a covert affiliation with the Secret Service.
4. The Final Chapter: Diagnosis, Mourning, and Literary Legacy
The memoir reaches its poignant conclusion with the abrupt intrusion of mortality. In August 2018, Steve’s wife, Laura, called to deliver devastating news: Steve had been diagnosed with aggressive pancreatic cancer. Though initial miscommunications over the phone offered a flicker of false hope, the reality of the prognosis quickly set in.
When Gillette offered to fly East to bedside him, Laura gently declined, noting that Steve was too weak for visitors. Bound by secular convictions that rejected traditional prayer, Gillette found herself searching for an alternative ritual of farewell. She turned to the act of writing. Old Friends functions not merely as a retrospective essay, but as a secular prayer—an active reclamation of a complex man whose private nuances threatened to be swallowed by standardized obituary narratives. Steve passed away on August 17, 2018, leaving behind a legacy that Gillette argues can only be fully comprehended through the imperfect, deeply personal lens of memory.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Literary Architecture of Jane Gillette
To fully appreciate Old Friends, one must examine the broader literary pedigree of its author and the platform that elected to publish it.
The Authorial Voice
Jane Gillette is not a novice essayist testing the waters of autobiography; she is a master of narrative concision whose fictional works have earned critical acclaim across North America’s most prestigious literary journals. Her bibliography includes publications in:
- The Hopkins Review
- The Antigonish Review
- Michigan Quarterly Review
- Virginia Quarterly Review
- The Missouri Review
In 2017, Missouri Review Books published her comprehensive collection, The Trail of the Demon and Other Stories, cementing her reputation for crafting prose driven by psychological acuity and linguistic precision. Her accolades include the prestigious Lawrence Foundation Prize and an O. Henry Prize. This extensive background in fiction directly informs her nonfiction technique in Old Friends. She understands how to pace a revelation, how to leverage scenic detail (such as the Yenching Palace takeout boxes and the stray cat left behind at the veterinarian’s office), and how to honor the fallibility of human memory without sacrificing emotional truth.
The Publishing Platform: TMR’s BLAST
Old Friends was published in BLAST, The Missouri Review’s exclusive online prose anthology. Designed specifically for works that are too vibrant, unconventional, or formally fluid to be comfortably constrained by the physical page count of a traditional print journal, BLAST serves as an incubator for contemporary creative nonfiction and experimental prose. By housing Gillette’s memoir, the platform underscores its commitment to essays that bridge the gap between traditional storytelling and lyric exploration.
Official Statements and Literary Perspectives
While Old Friends is an intensely personal memoir rather than a corporate or institutional report, its thematic resonance has generated significant discussion among critics, editors, and readers of contemporary creative nonfiction. Below are synthesized statements and critical perspectives regarding the ethos of the essay:
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On the Nature of Public vs. Private Identity:
"When we mourn public figures or beloved community members, we often default to a consensus narrative—the activist, the professor, the civic leader. Jane Gillette’s memoir reminds us that the truest dimensions of a human life are frequently negotiated in private kitchens, across late-night phone lines, and through shared trivialities that never make it into an official obituary." — Literary Reviewer Assessment
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On the Function of Memory in Memoir:
"Memory is notoriously flawed, marked by gaps, conflicting accounts from friends like Vicky, and outright chronological mysteries. Gillette does not attempt to sanitize these fractures. Instead, she weaponizes them, arguing that flawed memories are often the only authentic vessels we have left to honor our old friends." — Editorial Commentary on Contemporary Nonfiction
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On Platonic Intimacy:
"The literary world is saturated with memoirs dissecting romantic attachments and familial estrangements. Old Friends carves out essential literary space for the profound, sustaining, non-romantic life partnership—a platonic bond that outlasts marriages, geographic relocations, and generational shifts." — Critical Essay Excerpt
Future Outlook: The Enduring Relevance of Life Writing
As the literary landscape continues to evolve in the digital age, essays like Jane Gillette’s Old Friends point toward a promising future for short-form memoir. Readers increasingly seek out narratives that honor complexity over sentimentality, and authenticity over hagiography.
Gillette’s willingness to present Steve in all his contradictions—simultaneously brilliant and baffling, deeply devoted to his children yet prone to elusive political subplots—sets a high standard for contemporary life writing. It challenges memoirists to resist the temptation of flattening their subjects into saints or villains, urging them instead to capture the messy, beautiful reality of human relationships.
Looking ahead, platforms like The Missouri Review’s BLAST are expected to play an increasingly vital role in championing works that defy easy categorization. By providing a digital home for prose that pulsates with immediate, unfiltered life, these initiatives ensure that vital literary voices like Gillette’s continue to reach global audiences hungry for genuine connection. In the end, Old Friends reassures us that while time and distance inevitably separate us from the people we hold dear, the spaces we carve for them in memory remain open—welcoming us home whenever we choose to return.
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