Here's what "Randi" wrote into Obit Mag's mortality-related advice column.

Dear Judy,

I can hardly stand to write this, I'm so embarrassed. My older sister died a year ago, more or less. It wasn't a big surprise. She had uncontrollable diabetes. Also, she was very overweight and weak, never exercised and didn't take care of herself the way she should have.

My problem is her husband. I've been crazy about him for a few years now. Obviously, while my sister was alive I never told him, my brother or anyone about my feelings. Now that she's dead, my feelings for him are getting a lot worse. Meaning they're getting stronger. He was very upset by my sister's death: They have a son who's 8. I was sad too, but obviously conflicted about many things.

Would it be bad for me to tell this man how I feel about him now? If I do, I know my mother will freak. She was abandoned by my father right after I was born, so she has a lot of thoughts on the subject of love and marriage, as you can imagine. Also, I'm not too sure how the rest of our extended families will react.

I don't know what to do, which is why I'm writing you.

Randi

Judy's advice is, as ever, very sensible. As she says, "I'm in a really bad position here since you haven't given me a clue about your brother-in-law — namely, whether or not he's ever shown any indication that he's interested in you. Which is a fairly important factor." She also suggests that, given how short a time the sister's been dead, she should hold off - from confessing to anyone.

Here is what various dead people had to say:

Dorothy Parker: Darling, to hell with them. But remember: "Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away." Or not. Fools lap up folly like Manhattans.

Joseph Smith: Why art you not his plural wife in the first place?

Dr. Atkins: Diet and exercise are overrated. At the end of the day, we're all here and some of us haven't eaten a piece of fruit in thirty-two years.

Lizzie Borden: 'Wasn't a big suprise?' I know that game.

Jane Austen: Thoughts of love and marriage, madam, do not wisdom make, and what is more, the disapprobation of one's family can upon occasion bestow an untold degree of felicity - and distance not easily breached by a few miles of good road.

Anais Nin: The heart does not know law, know marriage...anxiety is love's only enemy!

Oscar Wilde: I have little to declare, madam, but your tedium. There are few things less engaging than a "widower," save perhaps an Ulster widower.

Flannery O'Connor: If he wanted you, he'd have you. Men seldom don't have what they want.

Jack Kerouac: Fuck You.

In Love With A Widower, Terminal Depression And Bucking Dependency [Obit]

Says the talented writer Maud Newton, in a review of the new Brad Gooch biography Flannery,

O'Connor's zeal, sanctimony and intolerance are sometimes suffocating. When Betty Hester, a pen pal who was joining the church under the writer's guidance, admitted to being kicked out of the Army for a lesbian affair, O'Connor responded in classic "love the sinner, hate the sin" fashion. Worse, she actively goaded another friend, deeply committed to the civil rights movement, with racist jokes. Not only did O'Connor tell the jokes, she apparently relished them, saving them up and spinning them out in a series of letters that have never been published. That she was (at times grudgingly) in favor of equality herself doesn't lessen the blow of this disclosure.

That O'Connor's views could be less than progressive, that much of her rhetoric was frankly racist and deliberately so, even heightened for comic effect, is no secret; in editing her letters shortly after O'Connor's death, her friend Margaret Fitzgerald deliberately excised the more offensive letters. The ambiguity of her views is evident in her more famous "race" stories - "Everything That Rises Must Converge," and "Revelation" - in which black characters are frequently portrayed as suffering for the sins of white Christians, even as she condemns the ingrained racism and sanctimony of the New South.

There is no "explaining this away" or "justifying it"; it's a reality of the author and incidentally manifest in her fiction. Those readers who claim such admiration of her work but express shock seem disingenuous; whatever else she was, O'Connor was no dissembler. Why, as the review says, is this book "a curse" to O'Connor's fans? Because she was often racist? This was manifest to anyone with working knowledge of her oeuvre or her biography. It's tempting to reduce her to gimlet-eyed wise woman surrounded by peacocks and sanctified by pain and early death, with the tiny asterisk of her frequent racism, but she was uncomfortably resistant to such treatment even in her lifetime. I get Newton's discomfort; because we love O'Connor's work, in some way we want her to be perfect, to feel as we do about things, so that we can better understand her writing and, more to the point, embrace it fully. And yet, why is it necessary to like or sympathize with a writer to appreciate her strengths and complexities? There is, perhaps, a modern sense that within the realm of fiction there must be a certain shared understanding, particularly amongst women writers - but isn't this terribly limiting? Flannery O'Connor is not interesting in spite of her views, repellent though they may at times be. Rather, she is indivisible from them, frankly and openly.

Flannery O'Connor's Complex, Flawed Character [NPR]

The women included in the list — Joan Didion, Martha Gellhorn, Susan Orlean and Simone de Beauvoir among them — are certainly impressive, but Esquire does not include any female writers from the past decade, and the representative passages they chose from these literary lionesses are pretty insulting to women as a whole.

For instance, here's the passage Esquire chose to emphasize from a January, 1950 essay called "About Shorty":

I have always thought there is a secret basis of pity in the friendship of most women, and that is a crumbling rock to build on.

That's it. Just that sentence. Of the 20 or so books and countless articles Gellhorn published throughout her storied career, Esquire has decided that this vaguely sexist commentary on female friendships was meant to be called out, without context whatsoever. There is not even a hint to the subject matter of "About Shorty."

And here's what they chose to emphasize from Simone de Beauvoir's contribution to Esquire:

Brigitte Bardot is the most perfect specimen of these ambiguous nymphs. Seen from behind, her slender, muscular, dancer's body is almost androgynous. Femininity triumphs in her delightful bosom. The long voluptuous tresses of Mélisande flow down to her shoulders, but her hair-do is that of a negligent waif. The line of her lips forms a childish pout, and at the same time those lips are very kissable. She goes about barefooted, she turns up her nose at elegant clothes, jewels, girdles, perfumes, make-up, at all artifice. Yet her walk is lascivious and a saint would sell his soul to the devil merely to watch her dance.

I give up.

Seventy-Five Years Of Storied History About Women Writing [Esquire]

Earlier: 75 Books Every Woman Should Read

• The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
• White Teeth, Zadie Smith
• The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
• Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
• The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
• Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
• The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
• Like Life, Lorrie Moore
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
• A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
• A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor
• The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
• You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
• Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
• Earthly Paradise, Colette
• Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
• Property, Valerie Martin
• Middlemarch, George Eliot
• Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
• The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
• Runaway, Alice Munro
• The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
• The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
• Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
• You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
• Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
• Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
• The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
• I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
• A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith
• And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
• Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
• The Secret History, Donna Tartt
• The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
• The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
• The Group, Mary McCarthy
• Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
• The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
• The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
• Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
• In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
• The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
• Three Junes, Julia Glass
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
• Sophie's Choice, William Styron
• Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
• Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
• Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
• The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
• My Antonia, Willa Cather
• Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
• Spending, Mary Gordon
• The Lover, Marguerite Duras
• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
• Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
• Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
• Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
• Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
• I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
• Possession, A.S. Byatt

The 75 Books Every Man Should Read [Esquire]

Earlier: 75 Books Every Woman Should Read

One note about the choices. Of course there are many, many books by men that "should" be read, but just like Esquire's list, most of the extant rosters of must-read classics are full of old white dudes. So our list is going to be mostly women. Anyway, here goes!

• The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
• White Teeth, Zadie Smith
• The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
• Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
• The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
• Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
• The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
• Like Life, Lorrie Moore
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
• A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
• A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Flannery O'Connor
• The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
• You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker

Now you go!

75 Books Every Man Should Read [Esquire]