Carol Prisant, Elegant Design Writer, Dies at 82

She had anxious, perseverating thoughts about death and worried that she might kill her own child. Her fears were nearly realized one day when, while she was at the wheel of a car in which her toddler son was riding, a driver drifted into her lane, forcing her to swerve and hit a tree.

For decades, as Ms. Prisant wrote in her last book, “7 Shrinks: 60 Years in an Undiagnosed Altered State,” published earlier this year, she veered between terror and disassociation. She could put a cigarette out on the back of her hand without feeling it. And for decades she was treated with the blunt instruments of old-school psychiatry — the tropes of Freud, electroshock therapy — before receiving a diagnosis only a few years ago of depersonalization disorder, a response to trauma in which the sufferer loses her sense of self.

It’s a harrowing memoir — Kate Chopin by way of Sylvia Plath. The “underbook,” as Ms. Prisant would say, to her carefully curated life.

In 2000, Mr. Prisant died suddenly of pancreatic cancer. Ms. Prisant left Long Island and moved to a grand apartment on East End Avenue in Manhattan. It was a half-timbered showplace she camped up by painting the living room walls bubble-gum pink. The dining room was purple.

Her smaller next apartment, where she lived until her death, was very pale — and very still, as she often said — decorated in an extravagantly neo-Classical style, like a set from one of the 1930s-era films she loved.

In addition to her son, Ms. Prisant is survived by a brother, Richard Lincoff, and a granddaughter.

Ms. Prisant wrote several books on antiques; a novel, “Catch 26”; and a memoir of her life with dogs, “Dog House: A Love Story.” She had many, and in recent years spent her weekends reading — and singing — to abused dogs rescued by the A.S.P.C.A. in Manhattan.

Her job was to get the dogs used to the sound of a human voice that wasn’t going to hurt them — to help them discover, as she wrote in an unpublished essay, “over time, that the world isn’t threatening.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/style/carol-prisant-dead.html