During her brief and polarizing career in a male-dominated sport in a chauvinistic society, a focus on looks over brains was typically how it went for Lane, who died of cancer on Feb. 28 at age 90 at her home in Kent, New York. When Bobby Fischer was still a brash wunderkind, Lane was a bona fide grown-up media star. In 1961 alone, she was interviewed on the Today show, was profiled in the New York Times Magazine, and appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated (Fischer would too, 11 years later). She was touted as a great American hope against the scary Russians.
Lane marketed herself and, in the process, elevated chess’s profile in America. Disgusted by the game’s latent sexism and classism, she criticized its leadership and advocated for equal pay. Then, as quickly as she’d arrived, she all but disappeared from the game.
A month later, Theda euthanized herself while I was still abroad. It happened after she’d attended a medical appointment with a neurologist who implied her suffering was her fault because—that neurologist believed—it had a mental health component at its core. I was staying at an Airbnb in Ithaca at the time. I hadn’t truly imagined Theda ending her life without calling me home. That day, Mum phoned while I was at a café getting ready to catch a bus to Albany. After the call, I remember walking down the main street toward the bus station on autopilot, unsure where I was going. Mum’s voice was playing over in my head, telling me that my sister was gone. It felt like I was watching myself from outside my own flesh.
I wasn’t mad at Theda for ending her life. She had chosen euthanasia after reaching the end of what she could tolerate. I knew that it no longer mattered whether her illness had been in her body or mind. All I knew is that she was no longer suffering.
The keys, knobs and levers of typewriters were made to do one thing, and one thing only: draw out words we each carry within us that have the potential to create meaning, achieve permanence.
In her debut novel, Allie Millington takes such magic a step further. Her titular character, a midcentury Lettera 22 (called Olivetti, after the company that made him), is a sentient if stationary being who — like so many teddy bears, action figures and sock puppets in children’s literature and pop culture — can worry, remember, love and fear. Olivetti lives, which is a boon to the Brindle family, particularly their quietly troubled 12-year-old, Ernest.
What this home turf lacks in breadth it gains in depth. Harris digs down through geological and historical strata, unearthing life stories from the second world war (Canadian soldiers, Polish resistance workers), the days of the French Revolution (bedraggled refugees arriving on the beach), travelling back to the age of medieval iron-working on the Weald and beyond, to the prehistoric era when Sussex lay under a shallow sea, quietly knitting itself together from chalk and fish bones. Far from finding dull familiarity, Harris discovers that “everything was stranger and more full of life than I’d had the wit to imagine”.