She submitted a heartbreaking gift of an essay. Weeks later, she was gone
It was the kind of piece that rarely lands on an editor’s desk, both completely raw and perfectly realised. David Remnick accepted it immediately.
By Jesse McKinley
January 1, 2026 — 7.30pm
New York: It was the kind of piece that rarely lands on an editor’s desk, both completely raw and perfectly realised.
A November essay in The New Yorker by Tatiana Schlossberg, the environmental journalist and scion of the Kennedy family, was not assigned or even expected by David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, when it arrived in his inbox earlier that same month. He was moved as he read Schlossberg’s tender, terrifying and unsparing account of her battle with cancer, one she lost on Tuesday, dying at the age of 35. The essay was accepted immediately.
“It was such an extraordinary, extraordinarily honest, in a thousand ways, piece of writing,” Remnick said after news of Schlossberg’s death. “It was so loving and generous that obviously, it was a privilege to publish it.
Then-US ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy, her husband, Edwin Schlossberg, and children, Tatiana and Jack Schlossberg, in 2023.Credit: AP
“It just had so much heart and intelligence and honesty. On every level.”
Schlossberg’s essay, spun out in a little less than 3300 words, fast became one of the magazine’s most popular pieces of the year, topping its year-end list. She also joined a small pantheon of writers who had written eloquently about their own looming mortality, including Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker’s long-time art critic, who died in 2022.
And on Tuesday, Schlossberg’s death prompted an outpouring of grief and condolences on social media and from political leaders in both parties. Her life was also memorialised on national news broadcasts and in pained postings from friends and family members.
Tatiana Schlossberg attends a book signing in San Francisco in 2019.Credit: Getty Images for goop