Emilie Russell Dietrich Griffin

She was born Emilie Russell Dietrich on July 22, 1936, the only child of Helen Russell Dietrich, a court reporter, and Norman Edward Dietrich. Her parents divorced in 1947, and she was raised by her mother and her grandmother, Lucy Powell Russell, Louisiana’s first female secretary of what is now known as the Department of Wildlife & Fisheries and the founder of The Louisiana Conservationist. Emilie, known throughout childhood as “Russ,” attended Isidore Newman School with her cousin and lifelong friend Henry Davis “Dave” Prescott, who later worked at Newman for 51 years. She attended high school at Louise S. McGehee School, where she graduated as valedictorian in 1953.

Like her mother and grandmother before her, she attended Newcomb College, where she double majored in English and Latin. In a class on the poet John Milton taught by her mentor Mildred Christian, she met John Kennedy Toole, the future author of A Confederacy of Dunces. They remained friends for many years. She later wrote that she inspired a sentence in the novel, in which Ignatius Reilly plans to step into society “with great style and zest.” Among many extracurricular activities at Newcomb, she reviewed theater, wrote a column and served as managing editor for the student newspaper, the Tulane Hullabaloo. Toole was the cartoonist.

In 1956 she worked for Mademoiselle as a guest editor, in a summer program that also nurtured the careers of Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion. She returned home to finish her degree, graduating Newcomb in 1957. She briefly attended graduate school, then worked as a reporter at the New Orleans Item, before becoming an advertising copywriter.

In 1959, Russ Dietrich began going by “Emilie” and moved to New York to pursue a career in writing. She shared an apartment with the writer and editor Shirley Abbott, a Mademoiselle classmate. She rekindled her friendship with Toole, who was then teaching at Hunter College. They frequently went dancing. She worked again as an advertising copywriter, first for Fuller & Smith & Ross, then Compton Advertising, where she wrote commercials for many Procter & Gamble products. She worked with Jim Henson on an unaired Gleem toothpaste commercial in 1967 (he told her making teeth for muppets was “exhausting”), and with Michael Cimino before his career as the Oscar-winning film director of The Deer Hunter, on an experimental (lost) commercial featuring Peter Boyle and Doris Roberts.

In 1961 she answered an ad for an 8-week playwriting class at the Circle in the Square Theater taught by Edward Albee, who was then working on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. In the class she met William Griffin, who had also moved to New York (from Boston), to pursue a career in writing. He proposed on their second date at Sardi’s, and two years later they married, on August 31, 1963. They remained married for 56 years, until his death in 2020.

Between 1968 and 1971, she had three children, Lucy, Henry and Sarah. She then returned to work at the Council of Better Business Bureaus, where she served as the first Director of Children's Advertising Review, for which she attended congressional hearings in 1975. In the late 1970’s, she returned to Compton, ultimately becoming a vice-president of the agency, and helped launch Pert Shampoo, coining the slogan “Bouncin’ and Behavin’ Hair.”

At the age of 41, she returned to her love of literature and began writing a spiritual memoir of her journey from Christian Science to Catholicism. She had converted after discovering the work of C.S. Lewis, Bede Griffiths and Thomas Merton, then wrote about it “not in any theoretical way, but in a practical way (as an experience to be lived and tasted).” Turning: Reflections on the Experience of Conversion was published by Doubleday in 1980, and well-received.

That year, she and her family relocated to New Orleans. She worked in local advertising, while continuing to write. Her second book, Clinging: The Experience of Prayer, brought her attention as an authority on prayer and spirituality. In Clinging she wrote “the best reason to pray is that God is really there. In praying, our unbelief gradually starts to melt. God moves smack into the middle of an ordinary day. He is no longer someone we theorize about. He is someone we want to be near.”

She wrote more books, on religion in the workplace (The Reflective Executive: a Spirituality of Business and Enterprise), aging (Homeward Voyage: Reflections on Life Changes) and mysticism (Wonderful and Dark is this Road: Discovering the Mystic Path). All in all, she authored at least fourteen books, and edited or contributed to many more. With her husband William she wrote the text for a commemorative book for Pope John Paul’s visit to New Orleans in 1987.

The Griffins were founding members of The Chryostom Society, a collective of Christian writers, including Madeleine L’Engle, Luci Shaw, Eugene H. Peterson and Richard J. Foster. She contributed to many of Chrystostom’s collaborative publications, ranging from A Syllable of Water: Twenty Writers of Faith Reflect on Their Art, an anthology on writing, to Carnage at Christhaven, a chain-authored mystery in which she and William were fictionalized as murder suspects.

She worked for many years with Renovaré USA, a Christian nonprofit founded by Foster, traveling to conduct workshops and retreats. Her book Wilderness Time: A Guide for Spiritual Retreat was the culmination of these experiences. As well, she published countless articles, reviews and columns for America, New Catholic World, Publishers Weekly, Cross Currents, the Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society and many others. Over her career, she received more than fifty awards for creativity.

In 1999, she and her husband moved to Alexandria, LA, where their first grandchildren were born, and remained active in the literary world. She wrote a history of the Eucharistic Missionaries of St. Dominic called These Sisters Are My Friends. She and William composed the audio tour for the Alexandria Museum of Art’s Heart of Spain: A Rare Exhibition of Spain's Religious Art, and worked with Spectral Sisters Productions, a community theater group, for which she wrote several short plays. In 2016, they moved to Metairie, LA, where they remained.

Emilie Griffin self-published her final book, Goodbye Birds & Other Poems, in 2014. Several of her books remain unpublished, including her autobiographical novels Buying Back Athens and Introducing Paloma. She had hoped to self-publish these as well, though the chances of recovering the cost of it were poor. But, as she wrote, “the joy of making the works available seems to outweigh that.”

Emilie Griffin was a lover of language (in addition to English and Spanish, she spoke Latin fluently), poetry (she could recite Shakespeare and Milton at length) and fiction (her favorites were Austen, Dickens, Waugh, Greene, Byatt and Ishiguro). Her favorite film was The Wizard of Oz, which she re-envisioned as a spiritual pilgrimage in Chasing the Kingdom: A Parable of Faith. She loved all things New Orleans, New York, Mexico (where she spent a summer while young) and England (where she travelled many times). She loved writing, which she did every day for many decades. But above all, she loved God, and her family, to whom she dedicated all of her books. She is survived by her half-brother Charles Dietrich (Cindy); her three children: Lucy Sikes (Gerald Herbert), an attorney and bankruptcy trustee, Henry Griffin (Larisa Gray), a filmmaker and professor, and Sarah Thibodeaux (Troy Thibodeaux), a software developer and artist; and her five grandchildren: Ardis, Avery, Houston, William and Naima.

A memorial service will be held at Lake Lawn Metairie Funeral Home, on Thursday, October 27, from 4:00-7:00.