'The Violet Hour': How famous writers confronted death

Katie Roiphe's fascination with death began early.

At 12, she was hospitalized with a case of pneumonia so severe, half of one of her lungs had to be surgically removed. On the ward, she was surrounded by death: a baby's heart stopping, a boy with cancer. She became fascinated by the deaths of children in particular, devouring stories of genocide as she recuperated.

"This is when I started writing this book," she says. Her curiosity about one's final moments never waned.

The book is "The Violet Hour," a portrait of six influential writers at the end of their lives.

"I've picked people who are madly articulate, who have abundant and extraordinary imaginations or intellectual fierceness, who can put the confrontation with mortality into words — and in one case images — in a way that most of us can't or won't," Roiphe writes in her introduction.

Her subjects are some of the most influential and playful minds in recent history: Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter.

For most of her research, she spoke with those close to the deceased — their children, their friends, their wives, their ex-wives. But for the author James Salter, she actually met with him. They drank ice tea on his porch while she asked the then 89-year-old Salter about death.

Roiphe told MPR News host Kerri Miller that there is a cultural hurdle to talking about death, one she had to leap over again and again. She found herself nervously approaching the subject with people, but always coming away with "extraordinary conversations," she said. "I think it's because this is a very difficult subject, a very taboo subject, a very uncomfortable subject, but people actually really want to talk about it."

On the porch, ice tea in hand, Salter helped Roiphe understand death differently — specifically, her own father's death.

"I had always had this story in my head about my own father," Roiphe said. It was a story she'd told again and again: He died of a heart attack coming back from dinner with her mother. He collapsed in the lobby of his building and "it was so fast he didn't know what was happening," she said.

When she told Salter this, "he went into my father's head, like a novelist would" and he said "I don't think that's true ... he would have felt pain." Roiphe's father was a doctor: He would have recognized the symptoms. He told his wife not to call an ambulance. "He probably knew" what was happening, Salter said.

"I had whitewashed it and made it an easier death, and it was very hard for me to picture my father panicking on the floor of his lobby, but also, after this conversation, there was something about it that was a release," Roiphe said. "Somewhere I had known all of this."

The revelation shook her. "I thought: Why had no one else ever said to me: 'There's something wrong with this story'? I realized it's because, who would say that to anyone else? It's just not polite. You just wouldn't."

The book, Roiphe said, took her "to the outer edges of where a civilized conversation would take you, where you really think about things in a more unsentimental way, and you say things that cannot be said."

Salter died a year after their conversation, also of a heart attack.

In her writing, Roiphe dives into the different ways thinkers like Sontag and Freud confronted death. Sontag fought it until the end, keeping up a narrative of her own recovery even as treatments failed. Freud refused medications that would cloud his brain, wanting to keep his thoughts clear. Maurice Sendak visited friends and family on their death beds to draw their portraits.

"The Violet Hour" explores how these great minds grappled with "the big question," and shares what answers they may have found.

For the full discussion on "The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End," use the audio player above.