Local girl does well, does good, and could use a hand herself right now | Opinion

As a kid at Queen of the Holy Rosary, when “Overland Park was not not not what it is today,” what Suzanne O’Malley remembers wanting most was to someday be able to repay her mom, dad, grandmas, aunts and uncles from Olpe and Scammon, Kansas, “for what they gave me.” She not only did that, but has had the kind of career that some writerly Midwestern girls might not even admit aspiring to.

She’s done well, writing for “Law & Order” and lecturing at Yale. And she’s done good: It was O’Malley’s discovery of false testimony during Andrea Yates’s capital murder trial for the drowning deaths of her five children that resulted in the reversal of Yates’s conviction. After the publication of O’Malley’s Edgar-nominated book, “Are You There Alone?” Yates was retried and sent to the Texas state mental hospital where she is still being treated. “I saved the life of a mentally ill woman with words,” she told me. “That’s what I’m proudest of, and that’s what my mom was proudest of.”

Her life in New York was pretty glittery: She wrote for all of the top magazines, and got to give her uncle who “wanted to be Hemingway” and had flown she thinks it was 36 bombing missions in World War II the thrill of being introduced around at Elaine’s.

But as you might have heard, the whole creative class is in trouble, making $200 a throw for pieces that still require a week’s work. And as you have probably not heard, even if you happen to be close to O’Malley, who moved to Austin a decade ago to care for her mother, she herself has been physically and financially leveled by a series of health problems.

Famous friends don’t make you immune

Famous friends don’t make you immune from those, of course, and neither does talent, hard work or the kind of priorities that made her leave the wow of a life she’d made for herself and move across the country to nurse her mom, who died in 2016.

For 18 years, she was married to the “Scoring” author Dan Greenburg, ex-husband of her Esquire colleague Nora Ephron, and she is pretty sure that she’s the one who inadvertently tipped off their friend Nora that Carl Bernstein was cheating on her.

“We all had the same dentist, and he said, ‘The next time you see Carl, tell him to come get his bridge that’s been sitting here for nine or 10 months.’ So the next time the four of us had dinner, I told Carl the dentist wanted him to come in, not knowing that Carl had been saying he was coming up to New York every week to see the dentist.”

Now O’Malley is writing a biography of Ephron, and is still breaking news and other things; it was she and her friend Barbara Lippert who co-wrote the viral Hollywood Reporter piece that first let “Golden Bachelor” fans know that ol’ Gerry was not as golden or golly gee as seen on TV.

After 5 surgeries, trying to avoid another one

But to be blunt, even though at 73, she does have Medicare, O’Malley is going to die unless she gets help with some of the bills that her insurance doesn’t cover. She’s had a spinal fusion, two hip replacements and two major surgeries for a closed-loop small bowel obstruction. One of those left her with sepsis and on a vent and unconscious for four days.

Now she needs a procedure that might or might not obviate the need for a third intestinal surgery, and “I have negative $56 in my bank account. … Tomorrow the bill collectors will call again and they scare me to death.”

In recent years, she has driven an Uber and worked as a restaurant hostess: “I’m not too proud to work. I’ve sent my resume everywhere, but the computer sees my birth year and has a breakdown.”

There are not a lot of jobs she’s well enough to do right now, though, and with her credit cards maxed out, because she’s had to cover so many medical expenses that way, “I’m dying for lack of $5,000,” she said on Facebook recently.

As she told me when I followed up with her, “my pride is literally killing me,” too, while keeping her problems a secret. “I wrote the ‘Golden Bachelor’ piece from the skilled nursing facility” where she was recovering from a hip replacement, yet never let on. “I’ve hidden being sick very well. And I even pretend to myself.”

All of this is so human, but I think I can also say that it’s especially like those of us raised in this part of the country to keep to ourselves anything about ourselves that might be hard for others to hear.

So she’s kept hidden from most of her friends and dozens of KC-area cousins that for all of her success, she could really use a hand right now.

This is a story about writers and artists, about ageism, and about our health care “system” that’s not a system at all. But most of all, it’s about one person, a woman her Houston friend Rick Newlin describes as above all “empathetic and loving — a giving person.”

It took a lot of courage for her to let me print the truth that just as she once saved the life of an ill woman, now she is an ill woman whose life she needs some help to save.

Her friend Barbara Lippert has helped her start a GoFundMe, and you can donate to it here.