Review by Alexandra Burguieres

            A good compilation brings you all the words you didn’t know you were worse off for not having read. The Woman at the Washington Zoo, a posthumous collection of Marjorie Williams’ essays, offers many of her best works — from the pages of The Washington Post, Vanity Fair and Slate magazines — in a collection that encompasses and illuminates the work and life of the late writer.

            In her profiles of Washington celebrities, Williams marries a straightforward prose style with a keen and insightful eye, resulting in a package— flighty yet firm, detailed yet sweeping — that dazzles with understated depth. Her profile on Bill Clinton and Al Gore, for instance — titled “Scenes from a Marriage” — presents the pair under a microscope, with none of the loftiness or grandness that had shrouded their usual media portrayals, offering an intimate and humanizing tale of the rocky and fiery relationship between the two men. Her ability to cut through not only to who her subjects are, but how Americans are involved, cemented her position as an insightful observer (and welcome staple) of Washington culture.

            Essays such as ‘Makeup and Ms.,” “Persuasion” and “Reader, I Married” showcase Williams’ signature wry and light-hearted wit, offered up with a mix of exasperation, acceptance, and a simple need to point out the absurd, while those like “Bill Clinton, Feminist” assert with more seriousness the need for accountability, not only of those to blame, but of those doling out the consequences.

            Death is a theme that lies heavily within the last section, which begins with “A Cancer Memoir” and ends with the last column Williams wrote for The Washington Post. It is here that her ease with language truly surfaces. She describes devastating scenes, but never once looses her characteristic practicality and self-professed fear of “over-dramatizing.” At times, she eerily writes of her own death as if it had already happened — analyzing and tidying up the loose ends as she reflects on her family and her friends, but she maintains a level-headedness and humor throughout that is both endearing and awe-inspiring.

            The greatest flaw of the compilation is that the original place of publication is not specified for any of the articles or essays; but this shortcoming is overshadowed by its grand accomplishment of being, ultimately, a source of reliably good reading and a tribute to a remarkably rich and distinctive life.