1. Why?
Lynn read, well—everything. When we first met in 1974, she was reading through the entire works of Anthony Trollope (over 40 volumes). This was while she was still doing all her undergraduate work and while writing and keeping up with the new phenomenon of fan-fic, not to mention the strategies of the Flyers’ third and fourth line match-ups, and putting up with a skinny, weird, hairy guy who kept hanging around. Other writers she “read through” over the years were Kathleen Norris, Catherine Cookson, Miss Read, Lucy Maud Montgomery (she especially loved her journals and letters), Samuel Delaney, C. J. Cherryh, Ursula K. Le Guin, Willa Cather. James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)—I’m sure I’m missing many. (Just for fun, Google some of the above writers to see the volume of work produced by each.) At the same time, she had favorite books she’d reread over and over: McTeague by Frank Norris, 1000 Acres by Jane Smiley, The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford, and anthologies of essays and short stories, like Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction (many volumes) which conveniently came out every year just before we’d head to the beach for a week’s vacation, a 700-1000 page paperback tome she’d read on the beach, and of course would finish on the second or third day.
The only reason I found out that she was reading the complete works of authors was when she’d say something like, “Wow, that was good. I wish there was more.” I’d ask why don’t we go to Borders and get another book by him. “I’ve read them all now; there are no more.” It’s too simplistic to say she was living out her online persona of “escapee” by losing herself in books, though that was part of it; reading certainly offered her a respite, like the beach for that one precious week each summer. But it was more complicated than that. Lynn was grounded in reality and only sought to escape her past.
When we were little, I think we all annoyed the adults around us with, “Why?” It starts out as a question but soon becomes an impish demand to every response: “Why!” Lynn read to answer those “whys,” with the seriousness of an adult and the playfulness and curiosity of a child.
There were connections to the “whys” in everything Lynn read. For Lynn, a common, discrete thread ran through all of Trollope, or all of Miss Read, or Ursula Le Guin. But inside each author’s work were hundreds of connections weaving together hundreds of different “whys,” for we all learned as children that one “why” leads to another, and another. She was reading to make some final connection, to tie it all together. So it was more than just a search for knowledge. I think what made Lynn special was her ability to keep track of those millions of interwoven threads. If you were to say just a single word, like “caviar,” she could follow the hundreds of “whys” and tell you things you may have never known before. She’d tell you about the history of the world’s once largest caviar industry in Bay Side, New Jersey, at one time the caviar capital of the world (in New Jersey? Did you know that??). Or how chefs use spherification to create things like coffee “caviar,” or the effects of over-fishing on the caviar industry, or how poor her great grandfather was as an oyster shucker on the Eastern Shore. Think of a few words, and then think how many threads lead from each one to all kinds of books and stories: silk; nuns; Gandhi; baseball—anything. She was somehow able to keep track of all those threads and follow where they led, and remember it all instantly. Instantly is the key when we’re talking about Jeopardy!.
Lynn was the person you wanted on a long car trip. How else would I have ever found out about the Great Molasses Flood in Boston in 1919? (I know, right?)
That’s the Lynn who was on Jeopardy!. She was quick to correct anyone who’d say something like, “How do you remember all that trivia?” She’d answer, “It’s general knowledge, not trivia. Trivia is Nixon’s shoe size; Jeopardy! clues deal with things everyone should know, like where Nixon was born.º Jeopardy! players are just able to access information faster.”
