I met Melanie around 1968, when she married my cousin Peter. She was family, and we loved her. I used to visit Melanie and Peter in the brown shingle house on Russell Street in Berkeley. She had a kind heart, with compassion for those who struggled, and she spent her life fighting political battles for those people. She shared the same values as our family. Peter’s father, my uncle Jack, had fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Like my mother, he had formidable standards of personal and political integrity. Melanie fit right in.
It was a coincidence that Melanie and I ended up in the same Comparative Lit. program at Berkeley. She started a year or two before I did and was much more strategic about surviving that program than I could ever be. When I was panicking over the hundreds of details I was supposed to remember for the doctoral exams, she invited me over; we sat on the pine needles in the backyard, where she predicted, “You won’t remember everything, but you will remember everything you need to know.” If that statement seems obvious, it wasn’t at all, given the unreachable expectations of the Comp. Lit. program, and my own perfectionism. She was right, of course. I quoted her to other graduate students for years afterward.
Melanie was a precious spirit, and her death is a loss for those who knew her personally as well as those who were influenced by her activism.
–Lisa Gerrard