Some years ago I saw a ...
Question: Some years ago I saw a Lifetime TV-movie with Dana Delany (the reason I stopped channel-surfing) in which she and her husband adopt his sister's children when the sister and her husband die on the same day, she of cancer and he in a commuter train accident. A few years later I was reading Kurt Vonnegut's TimeQuake, in which he describes adopting his sister's children under identical circumstances. He also mentioned that one of the adopted boys works in TV, so can you tell me whether this movie was written by said adopted Vonnegut child?
Answer: The Dana Delany movie you saw was A Promise to Keep (1990) and is about writer Kurt Vonnegut 's adoption of his orphaned nephews. But it wasn't written by one of the children; it was based on the memoir Angels Without Wings, by Vonnegut's ex-wife, Jane Vonnegut Yarmolinsky. She and Vonnegut attended high school together and were married in 1945. In 1958, they were raising three children, Mark, Edith and Nanette, on Cape Cod when Vonnegut's older sister, Alice Adams, and her husband died on the same day. The Vonneguts adopted three of the couple's four sons, James, Steven and Kurt. The fourth and youngest Adams child, an infant named Peter, was adopted by his father's first cousin. Jane and Kurt separated in 1970 and were divorced nine years later. He married photographer Jill Krementz and they adopted another child, Lily. Jane also remarried, and wrote Angels Without Wings while battling terminal cancer.
