Kwitney: Timeline
- 1964: I am born in Manhattan. My birth is induced so my father (the science fiction writer Robert Sheckley) can get back to L.A., where he is schmoozing with director Carlo Ponti, who is filming an adaptation of my father’s short story. The Seventh Victim. The film, The Tenth Victim, is so spectacularly bad in a mid-sixties way that it grows more and more mesmerizing with every passing year. I myself will attempt to age in the same manner.
- 1974: My first book, A Huge Lion of a Book, is published by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. I live on the Upper West Side with my mother, in a prewar six apartment. I have a shag haircut, like Jane Fonda in Klute, that matches my mother’s. I am spectacularly unpopular, but I have a great collection of comics, including Shanna the She Devil, The Cat, House of Mystery, House of Secrets and Plop. My main contact with my father, who lives in Europe, is reading his absurdist short stories.
- 1984: I am an English major at Wesleyan University, where I study with the inimitable SF writer Kit Reed and win the Horgan Prize for best short story. My unofficial minor is in comics and romance novels. I make some unfortunate choices in hair, wardrobe and men, but in these pre-internet days, most of the evidence is hidden away in a trunk. (Not the men.)
- 1994: I am working as an editor at the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics, where I started as Karen Berger’s assistant. I have an MFA from Columbia and am the author of Till the Fat Lady Sings, a comedy of manners about college and eating disorders (there’s a Sunday NY Times Review!) I am also married and pregnant with my first child.
- 2004: In a period I call my “Green Acres Marital Dilemma,” I move out of the city with my then-husband and two young children. “I’m Woody Allen living Jane Austen’s dream life,” I tell friends. In later years, I try to think of a suitable substitute for Woody Allen: Dorothy Parker? Susan Sontag? In any case, I write two dark comedy horror novels about moving to the country and turning into a werewolf. Readers, understandably expecting paranormal romance tropes, are appalled.
- 2014: DC Comics moves from NYC to Burbank, and in the chaos of the move they greenlight my Batgirl Convergence book and Mystik U, a supernatural superhero project. I also meet Mauricet, the artist who will become my most frequent collaborator over the next decade. We start working on projects for AHOY Comics, run by my old DC Comics colleague and friend Tom Peyer.
- 2024: I am amicably divorced, living with artist Bill Koeb (whom I first met back in the 90’s, when I was his editor), along with two cats (his), two dogs (mine), and, very possibly, the ghost of my mother, who came home to watch her favorite Twilight Zone episode (Time Enough at Last) and cheer me up on election night with a “hiya, Bubbeleh” before shimmying out of her mortal coil. My grown kids visit frequently, but I still complain that I do not see them enough. I start a new novel.
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