We discussed how writing helped her find purpose and a place, and how the creative process brings her into occasional contact with something even more transcendent: the state of heightened receptivity you glimpse in Zavaroni as she sings, a feeling good enough to guide a life and give it meaning. In a conversation for this series, Moshfegh explained how the lyrics to “Going Nowhere” recall her own struggles with depression, eating disorders, and ennui. Some accounts suggest the procedure was successful, but we’ll never know: She contracted pneumonia in the process, an infection her starved body couldn’t handle, and she died at 35. Zavaroni’s final, most dramatic attempt to save herself was to request experimental brain surgery-the exact details are unclear. But anorexia, a lifelong struggle that started in her early teens, drew her inward and ultimately away from public life.
A child star with a grown-up voice, people once thought she’d be the next Barbra Streisand. Then I read the story of her tragic, too-short life.
I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of her: Zavaroni’s performance of Neil Sedaka’s “Going Nowhere” is so charismatic and emotionally affecting that she seems destined for the brightest fame. A few weeks ago, Ottessa Moshfegh, the author of the new short-story collection Homesick for Another World, sent me a video of the Scottish-born singer Lena Zavaroni.
0 kommentar(er)
