Invitation to a Private Virtual Reality.

Notes for a Memoir: On Isaac Asimov, Life, and Writing BY JANET JEPPSON ASIMOV (New York: Prometheus Books, 2006); 207 pp.; $26.00 cloth; ISBN 1591024056.

WHEN WE CONSIDER interesting people we know (or famous interesting people who we think we know), we might assume their spouses will be interesting too. Likewise, it seems reasonable that really smart folks gravitate toward each other for fulfillment, engagement, and so forth. Then there's the brilliant egomaniac whose husband or wife functions as a mere melding of secretary, bedmate, and adoring fan. The two people revealed in Janet Jeppson Asimov's lively Notes for a Memoir: On Isaac Asimov, Life, and Writing are most definitely of the first variety.

While a memoir is commonly thought of as an account of one person's life and experiences, Asimov's book is filled with two voices, that of Isaac, the biochemist and famous writer of popular science books and award-winning science fiction, and that of Janet herself, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, prolific writer, and former science columnist. Offered as notes, Janet allows her memories--of childhood, her education and career, and of course her marriage--to flow freely and at times flit sporadically. Both voices offer observations on a variety of topics--the imagination, the writing process, sex, science, and travel, to name a few--in a style that is engaging, humorous, and accessible.

At times the passages work almost as a conversation between the two writers and one imagines what fun it would have been to sit around their dinner table. Humanists will likewise be entertained by Janet and Isaac's musings on religion and non-theism.

For example, Janet quotes Isaac as saying, "Human beings have the habit of being human; which is to say that they believe in that which comforts them" to which she later "responds":

   I admit it's cold shivering in the draft of an open
   mind while trying to be a decent human being
   without the prospect of supernaturally induced
   punishment or reward, facing nothingness with
   whatever courage it's possible to muster. In
   between shivers, I can respect people able to keep
   their minds open while enjoying whatever conventional,
   organized religion they need--providing
   they don't depend on their religious organization
   to do their thinking for them and tell them
   what to do.

Later, speaking of the Ethical Culture movement, Janet describes it as "a religion in the sense that humanism is. Although humanism doesn't subscribe to supernaturalism, it adds a religious dimension to life by celebrating reason and respect for all life." The reader again imagines Isaac's reply in the form of his description of radio show callers responding to a program he'd done on evolution and the origin of life:

   They quoted from the Bible and denounced me as
   someone who would steal the beauty of the universe
   (as though the conceptions of evolution and
   the long history of the stars was not infinitely more
   beautiful than the story of a petulant God making
   and destroying a pint-sized basketball of a world).

A particularly interesting passage is one in which Janet theorizes about the concept of usefulness, which she says people often equate with altruism and assume must contain some element of martyrdom, "attempted only in order to get rewards here or in the hereafter." In a very Humanist sense, she contends that "usefulness stands on its own" and relates Isaac's belief that "happiness is full use of your capacities along lines of excellence." In what might be misinterpreted as arrogance, Isaac was very pleased with the success he enjoyed in that he was able to provide so many people with information, explanation, and entertainment. This isn't arrogant but rather Humanist in its celebration, and Janet very well knows that.

Many anecdotes are retold from Isaac Asimov's autobiography It's Been a Good Life, which his wife edited. Notes, however, doesn't expound upon the dramatic revelation in that previous work's epilogue that Isaac had contracted HIV during a 1983 blood transfusion and that his death nearly ten years later was caused by heart and renal failure complicated by AIDS. One senses that his absence is still deeply affecting for Janet, and having been trusted with her thoughts on so many other subjects, the reader respectfully grants her her private grief.

She does note that her husband never abandoned his freethinking after he became ill. "He wasn't afraid of dying, and he believed firmly in nothingness hereafter," she says. As Isaac himself put it: "Life is a journey, but don't worry, you'll find a parking place at the end."

Isaac and Janet Asimov's relationship began in letters (she initiating the correspondence with a fan letter of sorts). Notes for a Memoir offers an intimate look into their communications in never-before-published letters, mostly written by him to her. In one such letter, Isaac tells Janet that "Knowledge is not only power; it is happiness--and being taught is the intellectual analog of being loved." Elsewhere in the book Janet observes, "Everything does correlate, you know" After reading Notes for a Memoir one concludes that these two writers learned much from one another, shared an immense understanding, and filled volumes in the other's heart and mind.

I recall attending a reading by poet Tess Gallagher, during which every last question from the audience related somehow to her late husband Raymond Carver, with whom she lived for the last decade of his life. Gallagher was graciously energetic in discussing her famous husband's writing habits, his peculiarities, and the private battles. The surprise gift I received upon returning home with a copy of her poetry collection, Portable Kisses, was the discovery of a fine writer, highly interesting in her own right.

The same experience awaits the reader of Notes for a Memoir. The book's appendix contains seven short stories, many of which were published separately in different magazines. Reading these delightful tales from the realms of science fiction, fantasy, and parable--a mall robot develops a sense of self, Alice as a jilted young lover visiting Manhattan goes through the looking glass in her eccentric Aunt's borrowed coat, a cryogenically preserved Count Dracula is unthawed and falls in love with his therapist, to name a few--is especially interesting after having experienced a certain intimacy with the writer and her process in the preceding memoir.

This metafictional quality best characterizes the book (originally titled Happily--In and Out of Private Virtual Reality). At the end of the afore referenced story, "Another Alice Universe" the young narrator returns from a Lewis Carroll-esque alternate universe and tells her Aunt about the variation she'd played on the role of Alice:

"And that nonsense about joining. That doesn't happen when I read the book"

"It does if you're lucky. You and the author join. It's like love"

I was embarrassed. People of her generation shouldn't talk about love. "Isn't it more logical that, symbolically speaking, each reader creates a new universe with the author ..."

"I believe that's what I was saying, dear" said Aunt Alice.

Jennifer Bardi is editor of the Humanist.