The New Yorker:

From 2023: Can we find a balance between structuring our time and squandering it?

By Rachel Syme

I used to keep a Post-it note hanging over my workspace with the name Esther Murphy written on it in black Sharpie. I jotted down this warning-to-self sometime around 2012, when I was inhaling Lisa Cohen’s exuberant triple biography, “All We Know,” about three queer women of ample means who cavorted through the literary and fashion circles of Paris, London, and New York in the early twentieth century. Murphy, the daughter of a leather-goods mogul (and the younger sister of Gerald Murphy, whose house in the South of France was immortalized in “Tender Is the Night”), was a brilliant talker. She held parlor rooms rapt with rollicking historical anecdotes and swaggering political soliloquies; her mind, a magpie’s nest of knowledge, connected people to ideas and ideas to sweeping philosophies. “If you asked her a question,” Cohen writes, “she would lean back, take several staccato puffs on her cigarette, say: ‘All we know is’—and then launch into a long disquisition on the subject.” But what Murphy could not do, despite her fierce intelligence and improvisatory éclat, was meet a deadline.

Murphy was “writing” a biography of Françoise d’Aubigné, a French noblewoman, religious fanatic, and proto-feminist who secretly married Louis XIV but never became the official queen of France. For three decades, Murphy hemmed and hawed, insisted that the book was “about a third done,” and failed to commit her grand theories to paper. Friends helped her make publishing connections, but Murphy blew past her delivery dates like a cyclone. Then, one day in 1962, at the age of sixty-five, while getting ready for a walk across the Seine, Murphy encountered the most literal deadline of all: she had a sudden stroke and died on the spot, leaving behind only a handful of manuscript pages and a cache of frustrated notes.

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