Thursday, February 01, 2007

Molly Ivins

I'm sad that Molly Ivins died, too.

I never had a chance to meet her, but one of my early projects as a volunteer while I was in library school was to do an appraisal of the Molly Ivins Papers, which had (at that time) not yet been processed.

Most of the boxes were overflowing with mail from readers. The letters were pretty evenly divided between gushing letters from fans and bone-chillingly personal and threatening hate-mail. I was amazed at the amount of gigantic unsolicited manuscripts people felt that they should send to her for her opinion. Her writing also seemed to call people to send her funny figurines, joke mugs, t-shirts, and other humorous memorabilia.

Reading Molly Ivins has always made me wish I knew more about politics and had more energy for dealing with the bad news that usually comes along with it. We need more writers like her...

1 comment:

carrie said...

i got to meet molly ivins in 2004 at a campout. she had been drinking a lot (and so had i) but i do remember her telling me that since i'd lived in texas for 8 years, that i could call myself a texan. i liked her :)