Muse

Muse

I was saddened to discover that Joan Parker died shortly after the interview in my previous post.

It was she who encouraged him to get a doctorate so he could teach at the college level, and she who offered a characteristically profane benediction when he finished the manuscript of his first Spenser novel: “ ‘Holy [expletive],’ I said to him, ‘this is like a real book,’ ” she recalled in 1981.

For many fans, Mrs. Parker and her husband were inseparable from Silverman and Spenser. At times, the assumption could get irritating.

“There are four of us now,” she told the Globe in 1981, “me and Ace and Spenser and Susan. She is a person in my life. I am trying to separate from her. Spenser and Susan are a composite of both he and I. But in terms of real life, we are very far away from Susan and Spenser. I like her OK, but what I dislike is the assumption that Susan and I are the same person. Sure, there are some similarities. The repartee, back and forth, between Susan and Spenser is like the way Ace and I have of talking publicly to each other. But I am me. I am not Susan Silverman.”

Two years earlier, Mrs. Parker told the Globe that Silverman could be improved: “I’ve actually grown to like her. But she still ain’t bitchy enough.”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/06/13/joan-parker-writer-and-philanthropist-was-muse-her-late-husband-spenser-novelist-robert-parker/4VLDZLrqHBjlWxcLpuujMK/story.html

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