Remembering Cathy Crimmin
Cathy Crimmins 1955 - 2009
by Sarah Francis and Robin Warshaw

The last thing our friend Cathy Crimmins would have wanted was a serious obituary. She skewered her way through life, gleefully surfing and satirizing the Zeitgeist long before others had caught on to what was going to be next. She tweaked sacred cows and sinners equally, all the time focusing most of her humor on her favorite target: herself.

Through Cathy's delightfully twisted vision, readers experienced her take on everything from careerists and cats to conservatives and children's entertainers.

"I like to heckle the performers at children's concerts because most of them are really atrocious," she wrote in Curse of the Mommy: Pregnant Thoughts and Postpartum Impressions of a Reluctant Mom. "Children have no taste. Anyone who has seen a Beauty and the Beast raincoat could tell you that."

No matter what the subject, her humor books, parodies, and stand-up comedy routines drew off the terrible lows, huge highs, and hilarious encounters of her own life. Cathy was a seemingly endless idea engine—a chance remark, an encounter at school, bad service in a restaurant—everything stoked her creativity. She wrote her way through the many crises that polka-dotted her life. She wrote when most of us couldn't. Cathy simply had to write.

That's why it was a natural progression when her writing turned to memoir following the catastrophic injury of her husband, Al, in a boating accident—when a teenager in a speedboat literally ran over him, while he was in a little skiff. The resulting book, Where Is the Mango Princess?, is a piercing and wrenching depiction of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and its effect on the injured and family members (Cathy and Al's daughter, then seven, was in the boat with her father but wasn't physically hurt). The book is also very funny. Cathy won the ASJA Outstanding Book Award for nonfiction in 2001 for Mango Princess, an honor that she cherished, and she became an active voice in the TBI community.

Most ASJA members who knew Cathy met her at one of the annual conferences where her panel appearances were punctuated by equal amounts of laughter and interest. Her sessions were always popular. Some members also knew her for the advice she would cheerfully offer when they asked her to read their book proposals or introduce them to her agent.

Cathy was "on" for most of her life, but especially so when she was in New York. It was her favorite city, the only place on earth big enough, colorful enough and challenging enough to be a match for her rollicking, larger-than-life personality. On conference weekends, Cathy would be our social director, the one who planned our great meals out on the town. Thanks to her, Sarah was introduced to Eleven Madison Park's foie gras crème brûlée (Robin took a pass, but wants it known that Cathy introduced her to Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream in the late 1980s, long before it was a common sight in stores).

Cathy also was a passionate theater-goer and made pitch-perfect choices for us. We remember how tickled she was when she scored us preview tickets to Frost Nixon and we found ourselves hobnobbing with Joan Rivers, Barry Diller, and Diane Von Furstenberg.

An indefatigable night owl, she would try to entice us to late-night cabaret performances. We never had her energy, so while we were toddling off to bed, she'd be cabbing her way uptown to hear Bobby Short. The next day she'd regale us with how she'd chatted up James Naughton or some other supernova who just happened to be sitting next to her. Things like that happened to Cathy, all the time.

Life with Cathy was always a wild ride. After years in Philadelphia, she headed to Los Angeles, determined to break into screenwriting. That didn't happen, but she wrote Jokes My Father Never Taught Me with Rain Pryor, daughter of comedian Richard Pryor. She also worked away at a project she called Sick Mommy, a book about parenting a child with a life-threatening disease. That crisis had hit when her daughter was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis at age 12 and Cathy had to once more fight with doctors, hospitals, and insurers, as she had when Al was injured.

Cathy returned to Philadelphia in 2008, to be closer to family and friends, as back surgeries had limited her mobility and were keeping her in near-chronic pain. In August, in a wicked turn that could only have happened in her life, Cathy fell and suffered a very severe broken ankle. She was in the hospital when her book about her daughter's illness was published, having undergone a title change to A Mother's Nightmare: A Heart-Rending Journey into Near Fatal Childhood Illness.

Nothing could sound less like a Cathy Crimmins title, but she accepted it with writerly fatalism. After all, she was already working on several more ideas, including Scooter Girl, a work to be drawn from her experiences of getting around the city in a motorized scooter. She was developing the ideas for that in her head, as she lay in her hospital bed.

Cathy died on September 4, 2009, from infectious complications that set in from the ankle repair surgery. She was 54. Her sense of fun lives on.

— Sarah Francis and Robin Warshaw