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| Amy Silverstein | |
Amy Silverstein, a celebrated writer whose memoirs "recounted her grueling yet joyous odyssey through a life that required two heart transplants," died May 5, the New York Times reported. She was 59. Silverstein forecast her death in an April 18 Times opinion piece, writing: "Today, I will explain to my healthy transplanted heart why, in what may be a matter of days or weeks at best, she--well, we--will die."
The details of her life with successive heart transplants were familiar to readers of her many magazine articles, as well as her two books, Sick Girl (2007) and My Glory Was I Had Such Friends (2017).
"Each transplant--the first was in 1988, when she was 24 and a second-year law student at New York University--gave her a new lease on life, as Ms. Silverstein often recounted with deep gratitude. But in no way did her life go back to what it was," the Times wrote.
After Sick Girl was published, Silverstein received fan letters from other transplant recipients, praising her for her courage in bringing to light the odd mix of joy and misery that can accompany life with a new organ--what she called the "gratitude paradox." She also attracted hate mail as a vocal critic of the health care industry.
Silverstein's second memoir recounts how her friends rallied to her side as she recovered from a second heart transplant in a California hospital. An adaptation of My Glory Was I Had Such Friends is currently in development as a limited series by Warner Bros. TV and Bad Robot.
Despite her health challenges, Silverstein finished law school after her first transplant, then practiced briefly before leaving the profession to raise a son and, eventually, to write.
In a sense, "none of her human relationships were quite so intimate as the one she had with the approximately eight-ounce bundle of someone else's muscle beating beneath her rib cage," the Times wrote, adding that in her April essay she wrote: "On our daily runs, when my '70s yacht rock playlist propels each stride, this heart from a 13-year-old donor revolts in my body with thumps of Oh puh-lease--and we giggle together, picking up our pace to sprinting."