![]() ![]() ![]() It was a reflex that he almost instantly came to regret. Could she keep it?īobby’s father didn’t think. Jen took one look and quickly realized that her name was all over it. One object in that pile glowed with more meaning than all the others: Bobby’s very last diary. Maybe, he told them, there was material in there that they could use in their eulogies. And so he began distributing the yellow legal pads, the perfect-bound diaries: to Bobby’s friends to Bobby’s girlfriend, Jen, to whom he was about to propose. Less than a week after his death, Bobby’s father had to contend with that pitiless still life of a desk. But inside, the guy was a sage and a sap-philosophical about disappointments, melancholy when the weather changed, moony over girlfriends. To the outside world, Bobby, 26, was a charmer, a striver, a furnace of ambition. But the diaries told a different kind of story. The yellow pads appeared to have the earnest beginnings of two different novels. He’d kept the diaries since he was a teenager, and they were filled with the usual diary things-longings, observations, frustrations-while the legal pads were marbled with more variety: aphoristic musings, quotes that spoke to him, stabs at fiction. W hen Bobby McIlvaine died on September 11, 2001, his desk at home was a study in plate tectonics, coated in shifting piles of leather-bound diaries and yellow legal pads. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. This article was published online on August 9, 2021. ![]()
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