(This piece is excerpted from a manuscript-in-progress, a biography of feminist, author, and artist Shulamith Firestone.)

Across some of the interviews, a pattern emerges. People searching for someone who could take responsibility for what was clearly a bad situation. People trying, often despite themselves, to find the one in charge.

A throbbing ambivalence suffused my first conversation with Firestone’s next-door neighbor. She was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when she moved into the apartment on East Tenth Street in July 1987, only a few months after Firestone had returned from her first hospitalization. The walls between the units were thin: “I heard… everything. It wasn’t right away but certainly by a year or two later, I started becoming aware that I was living next to a very disturbed person.” She was not, at first, aware that this person was Shulamith Firestone. “I knew her work before, I respected her hugely and was in awe of her. I didn’t put two and two together, that this was the Shulamith Firestone.”

But making the connection didn’t alter the reality of the situation: weeks and months became years of the neighbor being unable to sleep, as the distraught woman only feet away from her stayed up all night pacing the length of her apartment with heavy, stomping footsteps, or screaming at the top of her lungs. That first year, the neighbor would sometimes knock on Firestone’s door, but Firestone never answered. The neighbor left notes; these, too, went unacknowledged. Even as she tried to offer her support, she also felt fear. Firestone was often out on the fire escape: Would she try to come in the window? Would she set the building on fire? The neighbor didn’t fear violence from Firestone so much as the volatility, the unpredictability of someone so clearly in the grip.

Though a decade had elapsed since Firestone’s death in 2012, the neighbor’s anguish was like a fresh coat of wet paint when we spoke. Not only was the situation difficult to bear its practical, lived manifestations, she explained; it also evoked deeper fears. As a young person, the neighbor would regard this woman living alone in her forties and wonder, “Is this my future?” And, having grown up around mental illness, she found herself in a situation that opened old, barely healed wounds. Like Firestone, the neighbor’s sister struggled with the effects of heavy-duty medications; like Firestone, the neighbor’s father had gone into extreme seclusion, ultimately dying of his disease. The rollercoaster of emotions that living next to Firestone evoked—hate, love, anger, guilt, hope, disappointment—was all too familiar.

“Did you ever consider moving?” I asked.

“Many times. Many times. But I also felt, like, ‘She’s not going to drive me out.’ And rents were going way up. I would have had to leave the neighborhood. So I felt stuck there. But it’s a good question.” She thought about it for a moment. “I’ve never really asked myself why I didn’t just move.” I had never met this woman prior to our Zoom meeting, but I observed myself connecting to her ambivalence. I suggested gently that maybe the cycle of anger and guilt and love was familiar enough that she could live with it, even if it was hard to bear. She seemed to agree with this, adding later that “Shulamith’s death didn’t end these feelings, and in fact it exacerbated them in some ways.”

It is painful to consider that death does not promise an end to the pendulum swing of emotion. The lurch from empathy to anger and back again remains ever available. At some point toward the end of our conversation, the neighbor paused as though suddenly in touch with one of these swings: “It entered me that her family never showed up at the door. It was always her friends, and that made me angry. I mean, I get it. I get it… Everyone handles this differently. But I’m being dead honest with you, I felt angry. Like, where is her family?”

The neighbor’s words make me remember an earlier interview with one of Shulamith’s younger friends, someone she’d met in the early 1990s in a period of recovery. In the months right before Shulamith died, this particular friend visited her apartment three or four times. Having snuck into the building and climbed the five flights to Shulamith’s floor, she would stand in the hallway and beg Shulamith to acknowledge her presence. “I stood and pounded on that door and no-one [no neighbors] came out. No one came out to ask, ‘Hey, what’s going on, how’s Shulamith,’ or ‘I saw her’ or ‘I didn’t see her.’” The friend shared this in the context of having been interviewed for an article in a local newspaper, The Villager. The article, published online, precipitated a range of comment-responses from people in the building that the friend felt were unkind. “There were people in the building who were posting, ‘Yeah, she was a crazy, she used to do such and such,’ and ‘Nobody cared about her.’”  

The friend also wished for more from the landlord—any report at all on how Shulamith was doing. She would call the landlord and his secretary: ‘Please, if there’s any way I can understand what’s going on with Shulamith… Can you guys go in there, can you tell me what’s going on? Because I really need to know…’ They communicated with me once or twice, but they were really more upset about the situation. Not concern for her but about the apartment, the garbage that had been left outside. They weren’t as helpful as I thought they could be.” Feeling alone and thwarted in her efforts to care for her friend, the woman looked to people from the building as a source of support and found them lacking.

At the same time, this friend struggled not to blame herself:

I felt like, ‘did I let her down?’ What could I have done to be there, to really be there for her, so that maybe something could have changed… I understood the illness. I understood that it wasn’t about me personally, it was about whatever she had in her mind. But I just felt like, ‘Damn it! If I had only picked up the phone that day…,’ or ‘Damn, if I had only stayed longer and waited and waited…’ I don’t know. I don’t know.

The family, the neighbors, the landlord, the friends, the government, Firestone herself: who is in charge in a situation like this? Who is ultimately responsible? As the distanced keeper of so many of these stories and tormented questions, it can feel like my sad prerogative to absolve everyone: there is no one person in charge in situations like this. You did the best you could. You were powerless over Shulamith, and she was powerless over whatever afflicted her.

Mostly, I do not say these things. It is not—I know this—for me to absolve anyone and I try to remind myself that my role is to witness. But the racing of my heart and suddenly cold hands remind me that the witness, too, is a person. The fiction of a clear-eyed, neutral observer dissolves in a moment. In its place, as though summoned by sympathetic vibration, my own history presents itself as the landing pad for my narrators’ stories. As a child who grew up around alcoholism, I had experience with people whose afflictions disturbed me and made them unreliable and unresponsive. When I became a teenager, my frustration at being unable to control the behaviors of loved ones made me angry and critical, not only of them but of others in our shared life. I thought for sure I knew what was best; the problem was that nobody was listening. I passed the question of responsibility around like a hot potato: from myself to the loved one, over to another family member, over to a professional, back to myself, and so on.

In time, having sought help through Al Anon, a program for friends and families of alcoholics, I learned to place my struggles with other people’s struggles in perspective. I came to see that it did not work to force solutions on my suffering loved ones, and moreover that I became irritable and unreasonable myself trying to make them bend to my will. I was exhausted by the effort of my judgment, finding fault and irresponsibility everywhere. It was shocking to come to terms with my ultimate powerlessness: not that I can never help someone—in many instances I have had a positive impact on another’s life—it’s that I cannot count on my effect; I cannot hang my identity upon solving someone else’s problems; I can’t redeem anyone. Instead, I can stay clear on my motives and do all of, but no more than, my part, hoping that these practices will allow me to be of service in the world in a way I can sustain.

I’m not offering this as a moral imperative for others or any kind of general prescription. I understand that alcoholism is very different from schizophrenia, and that what I’ve outlined is only work that an individual to do—it’s not obviously useful for thinking about how systems ought to function. I lay it out for the sake of transparency, so that readers can better understand where I’m coming from as I attempt to hold and make meaning of people’s stories of Shulamith. When friends and family (inevitably) describe their limits—the not-infinite number of times they persisted in trying to reach her, how they recoiled when they saw her sitting in the street, surrounded by books and random objects, a decision to call the police on her (or a decision not to), when they unexpectedly tap into a vein of anger, resentment, or seemingly bottomless sorrow—my experiences hold open the doors to empathy. It feels like the easiest thing in the world to understand what they were up against.