Carolyn See | Novelist, 82
Carolyn See, 82, a memoirist and novelist whose writings captured the untamed world of California, where she spent her life, and her accumulated wisdom on moxie in the face of adversity, died Wednesday at a hospice center in Santa Monica, Calif.
Carolyn See, 82, a memoirist and novelist whose writings captured the untamed world of California, where she spent her life, and her accumulated wisdom on moxie in the face of adversity, died Wednesday at a hospice center in Santa Monica, Calif.
She had congestive heart failure, said daughter Lisa See.
Ms. See was the author of 10 books, encompassing fiction and nonfiction, and was coauthor of several more. For 27 years, until her retirement in 2014, she was a regular book reviewer for the Washington Post.
In her best-known novel, Golden Days (1987), she followed a group of Californians - she described them as "a race of hardy laughers, mystics, crazies" - who start a new life in Topanga Canyon after a nuclear armageddon.
It is not a dark book, as the synopsis might suggest. The bomb was "going to happen," the narrator, Edith Langley, observes, and when it did, people were relieved of the burden of "worrying about whether it was going to happen." In the bomb's wake, the survivors create a world that is better than the one that was destroyed.
In addition to her daughter Lisa See, survivors include daughter Clara Sturak; a stepmother; a brother; three grandsons; a great-grandson. - Washington Post