One of the great privileges of my professional life

Thank you for having me here to discuss Mark’s work and for the bittersweet pleasure that it has been going back over his text messages and email exchanges to put together my piece. I will never have another correspondent like Mark, with his quick wit and puckish humour and just the right measure of pathos, who could have texted me the night Trump beat Hillary in the November 2016 election that the apocalypse seems so obvious in retrospect.

Our association began eight years ago, in August 2016, for which we have our friend Dina Kluska to thank. Mark had just completed a manuscript during the shloshim about his wife Kerryn’s death and he wanted someone outside of his circle to read it to see if it held together, if it was good enough for publication, and to work with him to get the manuscript there – all concerns familiar to writers, who would understand how fragile you feel and how fraught with uncertainty the path to publication is.

He sent me his manuscript, I read it and wrote back a longish email. He crossed the river to the northern badlands, where we met. We talked for hours about his manuscript, about what was working, what could be tweaked, what could be amplified, and that marked the beginning of our editorial conversation and a friendship that would extend beyond the book.

We talked of Susan Sontag’s idea about all of us being born with dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. We’d read the grief corpus: Joan Didion’s Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk, Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Emperor of All Maladies. And we both had experience as carers of partners with cancer.

We discussed at length the question of a readership, if there would be a market for the book; in my email I had warned that publishers can be chary of downbeat books and books about death, but I have confidence you’ll find someone who’ll get the story. There was also the question if a work such as Thirty Days was a personal piece of writing that did not have the mainstream appeal that trade publishers require, powerful and compelling as it is.