"Memoirist and writer's muse" Anne R. Dick, who was married to legendary author Philip K. Dick, died April 28. She was 90. The New York Times reported that her late husband was "a writer of modest accomplishment when he met Anne Rubenstein in late 1958. By the time the couple broke up less than six years later, Dick had written more than a dozen novels and was well on his way to eminence as one of the most influential of postwar American writers."
While the "events and emotions of that marriage turn up again and again in Dick's novels, transfigured into science fiction," the Times noted that "above all, Ms. Dick shows up in female characters. She inspired Juliana, the heroine of [The Man in the] High Castle, who has no trouble slashing a Nazi operative's throat, as well as a number of shrill, carping, unhappy wives in other books."
"I was a good--what do you call it?--muse," she said in a recent interview.
Gregg Rickman, a biographer of the author, said, "Anne sparked Phil to an incandescent level of achievement."
Her memoir, The Search for Philip K. Dick, was first published in 1995, and a revised edition appeared in 2010. The Times wrote that Anne R. Dick "was making plans in recent months to self-publish her first novel, Gravity Slide, which tackles the eternal Dick theme of the fluid nature of reality."