When longtime
Texas Monthly editor Gregory Curtis first laid eyes on the woman who would become is wife, that was it. Love at first sight.
Over the course of their marriage, they traveled to Paris several times. With the final trip to the City of Light, Tracy felt like she had conquered this place, like she knew it and loved it fully. There was no need to go again. That trip was her final trip, it turns out. Tracy had already beaten lung cancer, but pancreatic cancer took her life. At that time, she and Gregory had been married for 35 years.
In ‘Paris Without Her,’ Gregory Curtis mourns the loss of his wife and learns to travel alone
The longtime ‘Texas Monthly’ editor’s memoir offers a tender and clear-eyed reflection.
with virtual book event information.
Gregory Curtis often is introduced as “the longtime editor of
Texas Monthly,” but in fact, he has been gone for 21 years from the magazine he joined at its 1972 inception, and that he ran for 19 years beginning in 1981. He remembers precisely that “June 30, 2000, was my last day at
Texas Monthly.”
Over nearly half a century, the magazine and its people have left a permanent imprint on his life. That was, after all, where Greg met his wife, Tracy, in 1974, in a classic case of thunderstruck love at first sight: “I didn’t know then that I would marry her, but I did know that I loved her.” They were married for 35 years and reared four children together.
They Always Had Paris â So He Went Back There Without Her
âParis Without Herâ is Gregory Curtisâs third book.Credit.Pete Kiehart for The New York Times
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By Francisco Goldman
PARIS WITHOUT HER
By Gregory Curtis
Following the death of my wife, Aura, who was fatally injured while bodysurfing in Mexico, I received a signed copy of a grief memoir along with a personal note from its famous author, who advised, âRead lots of poetry.â Since then, Iâve passed that advice on, sometimes with a copy of the grief book I wrote. Early on, only poetry could give concrete expression to my lost loveâs not-thereness, and to raw grief. But that author and I both turned our struggles into prose.
By Sharyn Vane
Special to the American-Statesman
Gregory Curtis and his wife, Tracy, loved Paris as they loved each other – fiercely, fully, flaws and all.
Tracy’s diagnosis of late-stage pancreatic cancer in 2010 and her death months later gutted Curtis. He found himself back in Paris as he healed, navigating both his new life as a widower and their favorite city.
Curtis chronicles that emotional journey in his affecting, heartfelt new memoir “Paris Without Her” (Knopf, $26.95). The former Texas Monthly editor launches the book Tuesday at BookPeople with fellow Austin writer Stephen Harrigan.
It was Harrigan, in fact, who gave Curtis his title.