Caroline Todd, author of the mystery-writing half of the half-and-half mystery-writing duo behind the memoir-novel-novel hybrid Half the Story, died on Sunday in the Upper East Side. She was 86. Todd’s daughter and her friend, Chasity Baumbach, announced Todd’s death in a Facebook post.
Todd died of natural causes.
Todd and Baumbach, a resident of Fairfax, Virginia, formed a literary partnership in the early 2000s, when Todd’s work as a journalist began to take a darker turn and Baumbach began writing fiction. The result was Half the Story, a book about the dissolution of a marriage and the existence of a secret life. It was the catalyst for the book’s protagonist, writer Sam Frank, writing Half the Story, the novel incorporating another life in the novel’s title.
Earlier this year, Baumbach and Todd reunited for a tour of bookstores across the country, promoting their 2010 collaboration, Portrait of an American Wife, published by Knopf. The book features Jackie Kennedy Onassis, a spouse with whom Baumbach has been in a romantic relationship for years.