Her Dark Places - D Magazine

Her Dark Places - D Magazine
The writer Kathryn Marshall McClendon shot herself in the head on December 18, 2014, at her
home in west Fort Worth, at age 63.
About 60 mourners attended her memorial service, including her brother, Rob, a prominent Fort
Worth civil engineer, and her younger sister, Caroline, a New York visual artist with whom Kathryns
life and writing career were deeply intertwined. Of the many writers who had been drawn into her
fierce barnstorming of literature, sexism, and mortality, only a few made it to the chapel at the
Greenwood Funeral Home. Jan Reid, Dick Reavis, Roy Hamric, and I sent a floral arrangement. Dick,
who lives in Dallas, was able to go, but Roy was in Thailand. Jan, himself shot during a 1998 hold-up
in Mexico City, recounted in The Bullet Meant for Me, was unable to come for medical reasons. I
could have driven up from College Station in the pelting rain, but I chose to be somewhere else. It
has taken a while for me to understand why. To touch the bullet meant for her.
I met Katy, as we all called her, in the mid-70s, at the Texas Observer, whose offices were in an old
wooden house on West 7th Street in Austin that was owned by attorney Dave Richards, husband of
Ann. Jim Hightower was editor. His brilliant and wildly overqualified Ivy League managing editor,
Lawrence Walsh, was soon to become Katys second husband. The first came via an improbable
marriage involving Hare Krishnas. There would be two moreto Bob Dattila, agent to writers such as
Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane; and finally to the late Paul McClendon, a former SMU
sweetheart and later a Fort Worth businessman. In her final years, Katy was involved with Darrell
Gladden, a roofing tile contractor with a quick wit and a lot of patience, and Tom Coan, a physics
professor at SMU. Shortly before her death, she began seeing a medical examiner shed met at a
drugstore in Fort Worth. Although she often talked about the importance of solitude as a writer, in
truth Katy needed to be around people. It was for her violent farewell that she chose to be alone, and
definitive.
During her early 20s, Katy was infectiously cute, a petite blonde who wore her hair in the stylish bob
she favored all her life. Her liquid hazel eyes and penetrating gaze radiated sensuality, backed up by
restless energy and a smart mouth made for Dorothy Parker.
Through the 1970s, Katy was a hot literary property on the strength of her excellent and dark first
novel, My Sister Gone, published in 1975, the story of two sisters growing up in East Texas and
parting hard in Dallas. Central to the semi-autobiographical plot was abuse of the sisters by a
maternal grandfather, a fictionalization of one of two real-life sexual violations that followed Katy all
her life. Her 1977 sophomore attempt, Desert Places, set in Dallas and West Texas, had clearly fallen
from the stature of the previousit seems rushed. Texas Monthlys Greg Curtis, then a senior editor,
wrote a strikingly derisive review. He even hated the dust jacket.
Katy knew people at the magazine and took the review personally. After that, she turned to
magazine articles, literary essays, and short stories, notably the wicked and minimalist In Case
Youre Wondering How Come Im Sitting Here in the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport,
included in the anthology Her Work: Stories by Texas Women (1982). She also produced a wellregarded and still compelling nonfiction book, In the Combat Zone: An Oral History of American
Women in Vietnam, 1966-1975 (1987). It was hailed as a crucial record of womens history in the
war. But she never published another novel. She started several and dropped them. A final attempt
was in progress when she killed herself. She described it to Jan as a hideously Gothic tall tale. Rob
has the manuscript and says it appears to continue the story of My Sister Gone. It may or may not

ever be published.
The day I met Katy at the Observer office, I did my best to impress her with my keen hipness to the
New York literary scene. Which was zilch. I guess youve been to Elaines? I ventured. She cut one of
those looks that a woman in a bar would give you if she wanted to shrivel your balls. Elaines?
Wheres that? Then she walked over my corpse and out of the room. I was enchanted for life. And
now she is dead. The only public notice was an obituary in the Star-Telegram, written by her sister
Caroline.
For the introduction to In the Combat Zone, Katy wrote: Living in America, we believed, could only
be contrived by drugsor by moving to ever remoter parts, places where we were less likely to feel
passion or be forced to analyze our confusion, places where we werent required to articulate much
of anything; our ideal, it seemed, was an unpeopled universe . We didnt move to take better jobswe
took jobs in order to move.
The passage was intended to account for why, as her writing career waned and a new and far more
difficult life unfolded, she had become so interested in the stories of women serving in Vietnam that
she would seek them out across the country, write to them, call them, and meet them in remote
places. She sought them in part because their transitory lives, their alienations, their wounds, their
struggles within a war largely conceived and carried out by men, so mirrored her own. As a kid in
the suburbs of north central Texas during the 50s and on through the 60s, I was essentially isolated
from anyone who wasnt white and upper-middle-class, she added. Breaking that isolation,
confronting it with all her strength and spirit, was her true lifes work.
Katy was a true individual and seemed to be punished for that bravery by people who need others to
bow down to their control, says Dana Joseph, her friend and editor at American Way magazine
during its golden age of the late 80s and early 90s. I dont think Katy was the back-down type. As
petite as she was, she had a pretty formidable physical presence: all muscle and sinew in that
compact ballet body and that quiet I-dare-you-to-mess-with-me attitude that Im sure she wouldnt
have hesitated to back up if shed need to. She was a rebel and might have survived better if shed
been born a man. People cant generally handle that kind of moxie in a woman.
The merger of Katys identities as a woman and a writer evolved all her life, becoming the dominant
if merciless call of her existence.
Beneath all her strengths and daring, there were weaknesses within. For Katy, it was the addictions
and the intransigence of her ghosts. She also suffered from bulimia and lifelong depression that her
family and close friends believe masked undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Demons? She had them on
speed dial.
At age 16, she left her family home for good. She had been born in Memphis, Tennessee, because
her mother, Ruth Taylor Marshall, had been visiting her own family near the Delta town of Osceola,
Arkansas, and Memphis was the closest city with a good hospital. The Taylor family owned a rice
plantation, but Ruth had been lured away by Bill Marshall, a WWII vet who had gone through hell at
Bastogne but had a promising career ahead with a Ph.D. in logic. The family moved shortly
thereafter to Texas, and Katy grew up in Arlington, Austin, and Irving. Bill joined the faculty at UT
Arlington as a professor of mathematics. He cut a brilliant and colorful figure, but he was an
alcoholic who could turn boorish and aggressive when drunk. He brought self-destruction to the
level of a sacrament and deeply infected Katy, a person close to the family says. Ruth was a
traditional Southern lady who put up with it. Friends and family say that Katy was like her father;
Caroline like her mother. It is revealing that Katy had a poor relationship with Bill; a good one with

Ruth. Both parents have passed.
Katys exit as a teenager came courtesy of her ballet skills, which were honed enough to gain her a
spot with the Dallas Civic Ballet, followed by a Ford Foundation Fellowship for the New York City
Ballet Companys School of American Ballet. After several unchaperoned months in Manhattan, she
returned to Texas. She said she hated the hyper-competitiveness. She found a place in Dallas and
lived on her own while she finished a high school degree in Arlington.
In 1969, she enrolled as a drama major at SMU. That didnt take, either, and after a year she left.
Her parents divorcedlater remarried and divorced again. That summer, after shopping at a yard sale
in East Dallas, Katy was accosted and raped. As was more common at that time, she said little about
it.
She drifted, found drugs, fell in with the Hare Krishnas. She used her dancing skills at DFW Airport
to get donations. At some point she was married in a Hare Krishna ceremony by some kind of
minister temporarily a guest at the Dallas County jail. The marriage failed quickly, and she made her
way to Austin, where she took her B.A. in philosophy at UT in 1973 and began a long relationship
with the late UT philosophy professor Bob Solomon. After graduation, she moved west for an M.A. in
English at UC Irvine. She began her first novel and lived with a Vietnam vet with PTSD who
influenced her later decision to write In the Combat Zone. Connections at UC Irvine led to the iconic
editor Cass Canfield at Harper & Row. The older Canfield took a shine to the bright girl from the
South and published My Sister Gone. Later, he allowed her to live in his home (in a closet, she later
said) while she worked on Desert Places, which he also published.
In 1976, she became the first female writer (and the second womanthe first was visual artist Ann
Matlock) to receive a prestigious Dobie Paisano Fellowship, offered by UT and the Texas Institute of
Letters. She asked Jan, the co-recipient for that year, to allow her to take the first residency at the
254-acre spread near Austin, rather than the last, because she was afraid her boyfriend, the Vietnam
vet, would kill her. After the ranch, she taught writing at UT and revived her relationship with
professor Solomon, although it eventually ended.
Katys marriage to Lawrence Walsh, the Observers managing editor, seemed to provide much-needed
stability to her personal life and to mark her ascension as a Texas writer, sometimes landing her
name alongside those of other acclaimed female Texas authors of the period, such as Beverly Lowry
(like Katy, also born in Memphis) and Shelby Hearon, whose Armadillo in the Grass, published in
1968, was part of the favored canon among Austin literati.
Lawrence got a Nieman fellowship and they moved to Boston. Katy taught in short bursts at several
universities, including Penn and Harvard, and wrote a few stories and essays. In 1981, the marriage
ended by mutual agreement. Lawrence later married the beautiful, fast-rising journalist Mary
Williams, now Mary Williams Walsh, a star at the New York Times. Lawrence, Mary, and Katy met
for breakfast once in 1987, an experience he described as way past strange.
Katy found more university gigs, finally one at Mount Holyoke, ending in 1985. She loved working
there and was heartbroken that her contract was not renewed after three years. She felt it was just
too hard to earn a living as a writer, her sister Caroline says. She would continue at the gypsy typing
trade a little longer in different ways. The results didnt change. To paraphrase Willie, the writing life
werent no good life. But it was her life.
The merger of Katys identities as a woman and a writer evolved all her life, becoming the dominant
if merciless call of her existence. Much of her ideological template took shape in Austin in the 70s

and early 80s. She drew from emergent feminist critiques, from reading the Great Hags (a term
coined by the radical feminist Mary Daly) and from examining her own experiences. Only recently
have I understood that life and writing are an item, Katy proclaimed in On Writing from the Center,
a provocative 1982 Texas Observer essay on Texas literature. When writers write, they hold mirrors
to themselves, and what they see reflected may be powerful enough to change them. I didnt know
this, except perhaps academically, until not so long ago.
Being a writer in Texas is an ordeal for all. I had approached the issue in an essay in the Dallas
Times Herald in 1981, shortly before Katys Texas Observer piece. I mailed a copy of the essay to
Katy, then in New Hampshire. I knew her thoughts about the struggles faced by women writing in
Texas were similar to those described by Hearon and so many others. The iconic Katherine Anne
Porter said she had to leave Texas because I didnt want to be regarded as a freak. Thats what they
all thought about women who wanted to write.
I included with the copy of my article a hand-written note to Katy explaining that I didnt address the
problems of Texas women writers per se in my essay because I was focusing on the problems all
Texas writers had in finding an identity not imposed by the Eastern literary establishment.
Her Observer statement became, in part, a reply to my note. While she addressed the same Texas
writer identity crisis about which I had written, and took special aim at Larry McMurtry, there was a
surprise swipe at me. She inferred that by Texas writers Rod means Texas men writers. Now I think
Rod is right in noting that those of us who dont belong to the [Eastern] fraternity must write
ourselves out from under two qualifiers, and I think hes right, for now, in segregating the ranks.
Because, as Ive lately come to see, woman writer and not Texas writer is our primary state of
emergency.
I agreed with Katy, except for the use of the note, but she later told me that Ronnie Dugger,
publisher of the Observer, had put her up to it. Dugger (who was once married to Katys stepmother,
Jean) had just purged the Observer of writer Dick Reavis for having been a communist and me, as
Observer editor, for not firing him. It was the last time leftist radicals ran a major Texas publication.
Hard feelings had not yet subsided. Still, the incident served to bolster my friendship with Katy by
honing our sense of awareness of the impact of what we write. The Buddhists say that your teacher
will come when you are ready. I like to think we were both ready.
An insightful 1977 interview with Jo Ann Bardin in the now-defunct UT student publication On
Campus shows Katy already testing and developing her thoughts on the experiences of women
writers and on the very formulation of language itself:
Im interested in women and sexual paradigms, particular sorts of women and the sexual models that
they find themselves working from in their lives. Also, Im interested with how that ties in with
women as artists, more particularly ones who want to write in this time.
I think theres a lot of junk being written by women today because there are a lot of angry and
indignant women. They ought to learn that if theyre going to write good literature, they have to
make their anger serve an end other than political ends. And a lot of that has to do with being
conscious of language and the medium theyre working in.
It is because women have been taught to be less sure about their utterances, less opinionated and
less rigid in the way they think about themselves and the things they say, that their speech patterns
and rhythms are much more open, flexible, and fluid than those of men. Theres a lack of selfconfidence in the way some women speak and writethats the negative side of it. On the other hand,

there is an openendedness to this so that when the language is bent properly, it makes for a lucid
writing. There is a possibility for real poetry in womens writing, I think.
Probably the most symbolic expression of Katys awareness of herself as a writer who is a woman
was not a written one at all, but instead something she did at the Paisano ranch house, during her
1976 residency. She had come back to Texas from California for the fellowship, and the primitive,
isolated setting at the Hill Country ranch freaked her outas it did other writers from time to time. It
was fall, and the creeks rose and the lower water bridge got covered, and all the rattlesnakes came
to nest on the front porch, she said in a 2005 interview in Dallas with Dr. Audrey Slate, who
managed the Dobie Paisano program for 30 years and is writing a book about the recipients. I was
scared of rattlesnakes, and some bikers came through the property and my daddy brought me a rifle
so I could shoot the bikers or whatever. So I was pretty scared at first but I relaxed into it
eventually.
Unlike the men who preceded her, Katy also saw it as a male space. Especially when looking at the
scribblings and drawings on one wall of the room she used for a study. They had been left by the
likes of A.C. Greene, Bud Shrake, Gary Cartwright, and Jim Franklin. Her sister Caroline, who came
to visit at the ranch to help with the loneliness, says Katy just thought the wall was ugly and wanted
to make the house brighter. So she painted over it.
But there was more to it than that. Katy told me the real deal, and she said the same to Dr. Slate:
I got there, and as you know I was the first woman writer, she told Slate. I was young, I didnt know,
I mean I sort of knew some of these older guys, who were famous Texas writers. And they, I dont
know, they just seemed very male and a lot older, and I walked into Dobies study and put my
typewriter on his desk and looked up at this wall that to me just looked like a bunch of graffiti. A
bunch of old drunk men that didnt like women, and I just said, Well, Im not going to sit here for six
months and look at this stuff. I went out and bought a bucket of yellow paint and painted over it and
never thought I was defacing history. Texana history. I just didnt want to look at it. It was ugly, and I
kind of got pretty upset about it.
For some years, Katys redecorating was considered by some of the Old Guard, especially Greene, as
a sacrilege inflicted by a goddam woman from California. Since then, the wall has been painted over
several times and the entire house renovated by its owner, the University of Texas. The painting
drama is barely known by newer writers or snarled at by the old school. But no one writes on the
walls anymore.
Back then, one was trying to be a writer first and a female second but was often treated as female
first and writer second, recalls Hearon, who now lives in Vermont. I do remember Katy being with
guys but not them talking about her writing. And of course those of us who were wives and mothers
had to struggle uphill to get writing time. It was hard to be taken seriously as a writer if you were a
woman in those days.
As surely as the 70s put Katy in the spotlight, the 80s and 90s pushed her along a path of hard living
and excess. Somewhere in that time the cracks that had opened in her earliest years widened into
the abyss that she faced with her finger on a trigger. George Fortenberrya WWII Southwest Pacific
Theatre vet and prominent UT Arlington English professor who married Katys mother, Ruth, after
her second divorce from Billwas as close to Katy as anyone in her life. He is now in his 90s. The truth
is, we lost Katy a long time ago, he said after learning of her death.
Katy absolutely adored Dad and never stopped telling me how much she missed him and how he was

in many ways her best friend, said Martha Odya, Georges daughter. It led to a closer friendship
between us. Whenever she called me, she would say, Martha, its your evil stepsister calling, in her
most wicked voice. Then wed both laugh and start exchanging outrageous stories and laugh some
more. Ill miss her terribly.
By the mid-80s, still jumping from university to university, Katy had met and would later marry Bob
Dattila, and moved into a high-octane life in Livingston, Montana, and West Hollywood, trying to
keep up with the macho writer world of her husbands famous clients. The drinking and drugs were
harder on her than on the men, in part because she was physically smaller, in part because there
was too much of it, period.
But she did find her footing enough to complete In the Combat Zone, and although they divorced in
the early 90s, Katy would always think of Bob as her great love. Even though, after the divorce, she
called me one day, obviously drinking, to tell me with great excitement how she had driven up into
the Montana mountains with the photo albums of their wedding and marriage and shot the shit out
of them. A few years before she died, Bob visited her in Fort Worth, but it didnt work out. In a note
to Roy Hamric at about that same time, Katy said Bob was, and always will be, the love of my life
And if I could turn back time (HA HA), I would go back to all those stupid, silly, Alice-in-Wonderland
things we used to say to one another, and laugh all the time, and I would act stupid all the time and
do animal imitations all the time with Bob.
I had reconnected with Katy in the late 80s, when I was the editor of American Way magazine. I
assigned her the first of what would be a long-running series about writers and their places, starting
with Faulkners Oxford. She did a good job and clearly loved the chances it gave her to travel on
someone elses dime. For several years, she was a steady contributor.
Back then, one was trying to be a writer first and a female second but was often treated as female
first and writer second.
From American Way, Katy jumped back into the Old South of her mothers time, taking a job as
health and fitness editor at the Southern Progress Corporations Cooking Light magazine, a spin-off
from Southern Living headquartered on a tree-filled hillside in Birmingham, Alabama. Katy was
theoretically perfectattractive and fit herself. She told a friend her job was basically to go around the
country looking like a million bucks. And it might have been a solid fit, but for what her sister called
Katys blind spots. She product-tested roller skates by zooming through the halls of the staid
magazines headquarters, spoke openly about things sexual, enjoyed the citys nightlife, indulged her
addictions. It didnt sit well with her employer.
The last time I saw Katy Marshall she was being escorted out of Southern Progress with a guard who
had spent the afternoon watching her pack all of her personal items, says former Cooking Light
fitness editor Melissa Chessher, now a professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public
Communications at Syracuse University. She was fired and banned from the building. A week or two
before her firing, she had ordered all this lingerie for a story she wrote about the power of frilly,
sexy things, and as we talked in her office (and with the door open), she proceeded to try everything
on I loved her intensity, intelligence, focused clarity, her fearlessness, her commitment to the
sisterhood, and her adoration of men. She never changed her hairstylesuggesting to me she always
felt comfortable with who she was and who she wanted to projectpreferred jeans, and always
seemed comfortable regardless of the company.
Birmingham also allowed Katy to spend more time with her equally beautiful sister Caroline. They
were quite a pairnot lost on the local male gentry. At one point Katy may have sort of married a

wealthy man and as quickly obtained an annulment. But the relationship between the sisters was
and always would be dogged by as much hate as love. Any reading of My Sister Gone and the In
Case Youre Wondering story reveal that emotional yo-yo. It wasnt mere sibling rivalry. Katys
writings, which were always about family and relationships, hewed toward violence and emotional
agony. The feral older sibling (aka Katy) in My Sister Gone not only kills her grandfather but almost
kills her younger, cautious sister (aka Caroline) and eventually dies in a Dallas tenement from a
botched abortion and her own self-loathing.
In Case Youre Wondering is a steadily darkening monologue from an unhinged fashion model (Katy)
featured in a current issue of Big D magazine who goes to DFW Airport for drinks even when shes
not flying. She is telling a perfect stranger at the bar about how her artist sister Loreli (Caroline)
invited her to Thanksgiving dinner and then stole the boyfriend she had met at a McDonalds in Oak
Lawn. It all wound up with ax-wielding violence that the model summarizes as: Loreli? They took her
to Parkland.
In real life, the sisters were so close and grew up in a family with such issues of alcoholism and
dysfunction that it seemed only natural they would also at times hate each other. But the photo that
Katy kept on her desk in Fort Worth to the end shows the two of them in 1977 cuddling together as
only sisters filled with love could. When I called Caroline to talk about Katys passing, the first thing
she said was I miss my sister. The pain in her voice was unmistakable.
By the late 90s, Katy had decided to leave writing completely. She told me she thought she wanted
to become a nurse, and thats what she did. It sounded like a strange plan, but in fact, all of her life,
Katy had shown a strong interest in helping other people, according to Caroline. She said she was
tired of being around people in an industry just thinking about themselves all the time. She wanted
to give back, Caroline says.
By 2001, Katy got her nursing degree from Baylor in Dallas. It was a short career. She worked a few
days in the Parkland ER, didnt like it, and eventually lost her license because of excessive DUIs. But
she used her skills to help manage the Agape Clinic in East Dallas, a free healthcare provider with
mostly Hispanic clients. Katy was fluent in Spanish, had a gift for fundraising, and enjoyed the job.
But eventually she left that one, too.
Meanwhile, she had married Paul McClendon, the Fort Worth businessman, and was able to relax
financially. She continued to do volunteer work at a clinic in Fort Worth and moved into the museum
scene. Outwardly, she might have seemed an artsy socialite. Inside, not at all. Most of the marriage,
she and Paul were estranged and lived in separate houses. She filled hers with artwork and fine
furnishings, and indulged her love of Zuni jewelry. She showered her friends with gifts.
Katy was not getting better. She visited Roy, a former UT Arlington journalism professor who by
then was editor of the great but short-lived Desert-Mountain Times in Alpine. He remembers one of
her visits well. She was desperate, and I had a terrible intimation when we dropped her off alone at
her motel one night, he says. When she called the next morning, I was greatly relieved.
Paul died in 2009, having slipped back into his own addictions, and Katy later began seeing Darrell,
the roofing contractor. The relationship lasted several years. He was good for her. They traveled
some and loved to go to Austin and stay at the Hotel San Jos, a hip boutique just south of the river.
Katy fit right into the theatrical and wanton ways that made the hotel famous, demonstrating her
disdain for clothing by walking around naked in the hotels prized corner guest room of glass
windows, and on one occasion searching half-clothed for her cat, which was back home in Fort
Worth. Then there was the night Katy took the sudden notion to walk across South Congress Avenue

to the Continental Club to hear a band she liked. And she did just that, dressed in bathrobe and
slippers.
Over the years, Katy stories like these sprouted and became exaggerated beyond belief. Many were
flat lies. I do know that my sister fueled the gossip mill with her fiery, juicy, and outrageous
behavior, Caroline says. The focus on her physical attractiveness to men and her sexual antics were
always a detraction and distraction for her to being taken seriously as a journalist and novelist. Im
sure this contributed to her pain, and in that regard, she could be her own worst enemy. As Ive said
before, her blind spot opened a lot of eyes.
The last time I saw Katy was on a rainy afternoon in a parking lot near DFW Airport. We had met for
lunch and were sitting in my car afterward, before heading separate ways. She was staying at
Georges house in Arlington. Katy adored her step-father, as she had her own mother, and even her
stepmother: Jean Williams (Ronnie) Dugger (Bill) Marshall (Bob) Sherrill. As an extended family, it
was a contender, and every time she tried to explain it, my brain froze up. But family was something
Katy could neither live with nor without.
We talked of cabbages and kings, and also some of our favorite authorsJohn Hawkes and Peter
Handkeand quite a bit about religion. My book American Voudou had come out, and it led to
comparisons with more familiar religions, especially Catholicism. Raised Episcopalian, Katy had
always been interested in the Church, and according to Caroline had gone to Jesuit retreats
throughout her life. Katy told me she was finally thinking about joining for real. I told her I had been
thinking about Zen Buddhism, which also interested her. She never became a Catholic, but I did take
up the Zen path.
At some point in the car, with the rain spattering the windshield, it occurred to both of us that we
might take our friendship to another level. It was very easy to kiss her after so many years. But the
idea of starting a romance was stupid, and we both knew it. Eventually she needed to get back to
Georges house. I never saw her again.
She called once or twice, having been drinking, and one time wanting to talk about either money or
Cooking Light, or both. At least a decade ago, I got a postcard. I wish I had saved it. It never
occurred to me that there would never be another call, another card, another slurred message with
whose content I might not want to engage. On hearing the news of her suicide, I wondered what
more I could have done. But I had experience with the limits of care dealing with mental illness in
my own family. In that, I had great sympathy for what Caroline and Rob and other relatives had gone
through over the years. And of course the rest of us who were called upon to step in. Usually we did.
Katy knew it and always appreciated it. But sometimes nothing could be done. A high-functioning
alcoholic is still an alcoholic. She quit drinking a few times and went to rehab at least twice. It never
worked. She told Caroline, I just cant help myself.
In time, I came to understand why her death had bothered me so much. There are no heroes in this
story, Darrell told me. And I do not say so. Katys death shattered me, because her life was a more
reckless version of my own. How many times had I moved to different jobsmagazines, teaching,
newspapers, freelancing? It was what writers did. How many women had I loved or tried to love,
inflicting or suffering pain as though it would all just mend, and ending up with no one? Behaved
outrageously for the hell of it? It was what writers did. How many times had I and my pals wrecked a
bar, prowled sordid streets, or walked through jungles and desert places drunk and disorderly, and
bragged about it? It was what writers did. At least the male ones. Because as a male writer,
especially in Texas, you always have to prove your manhood. For a woman? Are bad boys different
from bad girls?

Katy never respected that boundary. For that she must not be forgotten, or dismissed.
Five weeks before she picked up the pistol, Katy had switched to a new antidepressant. Darrell told
her to get off it because it was producing psychotic episodes. But once you get into that, you cant
pull out. As a nurse, Katy knew what drinking and drugs did for depression, and how they interacted
with medications. I think she also would have been familiar with the suicide (by drowning) note
written by Virginia Woolf, also thought to have had depression and bipolar disorder: I feel certain
that I am going mad again. And I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I cant
concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.
On the day she died, Katy had plans to visit George and Martha at Christmas, and to go to Mexico in
January. She told friends she was worried about what would happen to her because of her
addictions, especially over the holidays. She told Caroline she felt trapped.
What finally went through Katys mind, fueled by the drinking and antidepressants, can never be
known. Despite all that she had accomplished, despite the wild and energetic fullness she had forcefed into her own existence, she was finally more fearful of being alone than of being dead.
People come into our lives, Darrell says, and we dont realize how much. When they leave, theres a
void that will never be filled. Never. I never knew anyone like Katy and never will.
Instead of driving north in the rain to a funeral in Fort Worth I was still struggling to understand, I
headed 40 miles southeast to the American Bodhi Center, a 515-acre Buddhist retreat deep in the
thick forests outside Hempstead. It is like another world. I was pretty sure Katy would have
approved.
I went inside the reception office to ask where I could sit for meditation. The staff volunteer on duty
indicated a small pagoda building down a long, covered walkway. It was where he usually allowed
me to sit when the main meditation hall was in use. He didnt ask, but I said that I had come to offer
prayers to a friend who had died.
He said he was sorry and asked how she had died. I used a forefinger and thumb to indicate a
cocked gun and put it to my head. I bent my thumb to indicate the hammer falling.
His eyes widened. His expression indicated he understood exactly what I meant. And he simply
looked at me. I knew I had come to the right place.
Rod Davis is a former senior writer for D Magazine and author of the novels South, America, and
Corinas Way. He is grateful to Katys friends Roy Hamric and Jan Reid and to Katys family for their
research and support.
http://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2015/october/novelist-kathryn-marshall