In 2012, Binnie Kirshenbaum began to suspect that something was wrong with her husband. Anthony, an accomplished scientist and academic, was experiencing periodic hallucinations. On one occasion, he thought he saw two women sitting at a table in the street drinking wine. On another he saw clowns, then a baseball game.
Kirshenbaum and her husband consulted doctors as his cognitive slips and odd behavior—he would put milk in the freezer, disappear for nine-hour walks—accelerated. Eventually diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, Anthony died in 2020, at 63, leaving Kirshenbaum to make sense of the disease that robbed her of her partner of three decades.
“For a long time, when we didn’t actually know what was wrong with my husband, I was taking notes,” Kirshenbaum tells me in the living room of her West Village apartment, a maximalist space filled with photographs and thrift store finds. The walls are painted a rich green, giving the room the feel of a secret garden in the heart of Manhattan. “I had horrible sorrow, and anger at him, which wasn’t fair, and anger at the world. When he died, I started to recopy what I had kept in my notebook, and that process took me in all kinds of different directions.”
Those notes informed Kirshenbaum’s new novel, Counting Backwards—out in March from Soho Press—a tragicomic story about a woman whose husband is diagnosed with dementia. Kirshenbaum is the author of eight previous books—including On Mermaid Avenue, her 1992 debut novel; Hester Among the Ruins; and Rabbits for Food—that have been published in the U.S., Brazil, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, and the U.K. Like a modern-day Dorothy Parker, she produces darkly humorous and bittersweet works, marked by pointed prose and clever one-liners, that feature flawed leads and tackle heartbreak, depression, and other life struggles with a deceptively light touch.
“I don’t like likable characters,” Kirshenbaum says. “I want to see the ugly side of humanity and know that there’s still humanity in there.”
Mark Doten, Kirshenbaum’s editor, was profoundly moved when he first read the novel. “Binnie is a remarkable writer who’s been working somewhat under the radar for years,” Doten says. “She brings a quality of New York City coolness and jadedness to her characters, but underneath that there are overwhelming depths of emotion and incredible comedy and pathos. It’s time for her to get the career recognition she deeply deserves.”
Born in Westchester, N.Y., Kirshenbaum was an only child who felt unseen. “I was miserable,” she reveals. “I was probably always depressed. When I entered adolescence, I would cry for days on end.” Her parents neglected her. “They shouldn’t have had children. I remember once my mother saying, ‘You were such a good baby, I could leave you alone all day.’ Then they got this idea that I was this fuckup and destined to be a failure. When I published my first book, my mother asked why I didn’t dedicate it to her. I told her she never supported me, and she said, ‘You’re right; I didn’t. I never dreamed you’d actually do it.’ ”
Kirshenbaum moved to Manhattan at 18 and mostly cut ties with her family. She received a BA from Columbia University in 1980 and an MFA from Brooklyn College in 1984, and has been a writing professor at Columbia since 2002 and has also served as the department chair and the director of fiction. She met her husband while working part-time as a jazz club waitress in the late 1980s. “He would flirt and at first I couldn’t stand him,” she says. The two fell in love and married in 1990 and chose not to have kids. “I had no desire,” Kirshenbaum quips, “to reproduce myself.”
Counting Backwards follows New York married couple Addie, a collage artist, and Leo, a scientist, whose lives unravel after Leo develops Lewy body dementia at age 53, leaving Addie to care for him (she’s ill-equipped) while trying to work on her art and secure a coveted gallery show. Leo’s mental disconnects intensify—he buys dog biscuits for the cat, reads books upside down—and, after he’s forced out of his job, Addie wonders how she’ll support them financially. His worsening condition culminates in an act of violence that requires Addie to move him to an assisted living facility, and later to an apartment, where he lives with a Jamaican caregiver who, humorously, is much nicer to him than Addie and becomes a kind of proxy wife. As Leo declines, Kirshenbaum explores the impact of a neurological condition on a person’s life—it’s a bit like reading Oliver Sacks’s classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in novel form—while presenting a nuanced portrait of a wife: an imperfect, sometimes selfish woman who’s trying to balance caring for her spouse with caring for herself.
Kirshenbaum says she worked on Counting Backwards for four intense years. “I felt like I was betraying my husband by writing the book, even though the characters weren’t us and there’s so much in it that didn’t happen to him,” she says, adding that people sometimes don’t understand that a novel isn’t a memoir. “It was the hardest book I’ve written. I felt like I was exposing him, and it made me uncomfortable.” Still, she continued to work at a frenzied pace, eventually writing seven days a week. “I’d occasionally take a day off, but for the most part it was around the clock.”
Joy Harris, Kirshenbaum’s agent, praises the author for her singular talent and candor. “There’s something very original in the way Binnie tells a story,” Harris says. “Her originality and truthfulness stand out. That expression of leaving it all on the page, that’s what she does. That’s what has always drawn me to her work.”
Kirshenbaum is a magnetic and authentic personality, and her apartment, which she shares with her two cats, Barry and Brenda, is an expression of her wit and colorful imagination. Asked if she still gets depressed, she replies that she’s “nicely medicated” and reveals that so is Brenda, who used to torment Barry (“He’s dumber, but nicer”) and now gets kitty Prozac to mellow her out. “It’s a little embarrassing, but at least she’s not going for his throat anymore,” Kirshenbaum says.
With her fiction, Kirshenbaum wants to skip the pleasantries and get real. “The thing you don’t think you should write—that’s the thing you should write,” she notes. Humor is her gift, and she applies it
like a balm to the pain of life. “I’ve always believed that comedy and tragedy are bound together. If I couldn’t find the comedy in something, I wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning.”
Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.
