Le Guin

At the optometrist's office a year ago, I saw a familiar face, a tiny old lady, who shuffled in slowly, an air of despair and irritation about her - and then the oblivious receptionist called out a name: "Ursula Le Guin?" Indeed. She collected her glasses and sat down to wait for a fitting. I approached her and awkwardly introduced myself, told her how deeply her writing had touched me and my family. She said thank you, was a bit crotchety - obviously wasn't in the mood to be bombarded. But I said my piece.

I learned yesterday that she died. Ursula K. Le Guin. It's entirely possible that without her writing, my family would not exist. In our early days of courting, my now husband, whom I sincerely was uncertain was actually a human being and not some odd undercover space alien, gave me an anthology volume of four of her novels. We then ended up snowed in for a week and I stayed up reading them, and fell in love with him because he knew, or hoped, I might love her. And I did. To the uninitiated, I can only hope to describe the majesty and barren beauty of her writing, the deep down elemental truth of it. Left Hand of Darkness is still the most intimate love story I have ever read.

By coincidence, my kid just completed his first Le Guin book, and I was reading it on the day she died. The first Earthsea book.

Le Guin made me feel the unsettled power of the thing we are really talking about when we talk about gender. She brought something sacred and wild and holy into her writing. I imagine her reincarnated now as a tiny seed, that will sprout into a massive tree deep in an unseen forest, putting down roots that will extend into the deepest bowels of the earth, and emerge to topple cities and patriarchs with a verdant, feminine fury.