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According to Kushner, Sendak wrote the text in the late 1990s and kept it in a drawer along with other possible projects. As his health declined, Sendak began thinking more about his legacy. He was well aware of the story of Verdi, whose masterpiece "Falstaff" premiered when the composer was 80. "And that became an intimidating factor for him (Sendak). He was putting a lot of pressure on himself to make a masterpiece at the end," Kushner says. "I'd say,
'Maurice, you're making it too hard on yourself. If you keep telling yourself it has to be the greatest thing you've ever done, you'll never do it.'" Kushner says the book also is a memorial for Sendak's longtime partner, Eugene Glynn, who died in 2007, and a conscious farewell from the author himself. The playwright notes that the illustrations for "My Brother's Book" were a window into Sendak's health and frame of mind. He had developed cataracts and the work seemed to reflect, almost literally, the world as Sendak saw it. "You see his vision worsening, the hand getting shakier," Kushner says of the illustrations in Sendak's book. "There were days he was really working; the bear drawings are exquisitely detailed. And other pictures are more impressionistic, water-colory. "On days he felt too bad to work, he was absolutely miserable. Right after he had cataract surgery, he was lamenting he couldn't draw and he was getting depressed and angry about it. I remember one day I came into the house (in Ridgefield, Conn.) and he didn't hear me. I went into his workroom and there he was at the drawing table, his nose up to the paper, hand over one eye. And he was drawing."
[Associated
Press;
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