In the early nineties, I was teaching at Harvard and fortunate enough to find myself directing a senior honors thesis that required less of me than any job I had ever held before or since. Each week, a shy young woman would show up at my office with a story or two, and I would devour them and greedily ask if she could please just keep doing what she was doing and bring me more.
This young woman was Judy Budnitz. I met her right after I began my five-year stint at Harvard. She was a sophomore at the time, and even then she was turning in some of the best work I had ever seen in an undergraduate writing workshop. She wrote beautifully, had a natural gift for finding the shape and arc of a story, and a vision of the world like none I had ever encountered. In one story, a girl with a leprosy-like condition flaked away into nothingness. In another, a girl fell from the sky. A mother tried to guilt her son into literally giving her his heart. An old man told how children were once created: rolled out, shaped, and baked like a loaf of bread. Her stories were so vividly unique and yet, at their hearts, bound to human emotion and circumstance as old as Moses.
Judy was a star; she was wholly original, and her talent was apparent to all. Still, at that time, she was best known for the cartoons she drew for Harvard’s newspaper, the Lampoon, and soon my office was decorated with many of these—Lorena Bobbitt wielding a big knife, a surgeon sheepishly holding up the wrong organ. Dark situations that, I daresay, Charles Addams would have wished he’d thought of first. Her eye for ironic detail and her wry—often macabre—sense of humor fed both her drawing and her writing in a way that was nothing short of brilliant.
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