Frances Deborah Katz, of Decatur, Ga., died Sept. 14, 2021, of natural causes.

Frances was the only child of Harry Katz, who died in 1999, and Matilda (Jaffe) Katz, who died in 1991. She was born in Leominster, Mass. but always thought of herself as a Bostonian; the Citgo sign that towers over Kenmore Square is blazoned atop her Facebook page. She graduated from Boston University with a degree in journalism and earned a masters’ degree in English and American literature at Harvard University, writing a thesis on the haunted world of Eudora Welty. “Research does not scare me,” she wrote on her website.

After graduate school, Frances was a staff writer at the Boston Herald, working in the features department, where she wrote smartly and acerbically about television and culture. She followed that by moving to New York City, the heart of culture, where she worked for the New York Times’ earliest digital efforts, Cowles Media Daily, and MTV. She came south to Atlanta in 1998, working for four years as a technology reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, illuminating fun and fascinating corners of the young internet for readers who were mostly still using AOL.

Reinventing herself in her 40s, Frances returned to Boston to earn a JD at the New England School of Law (now New England Law-Boston). While there, she helped write the first iteration of the Digital Media Law Guide as a clerk at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She came back south to Decatur — always a city kid, she was very proud of buying one of the first high-rise condos built in its heart — and became a project attorney at Alston & Bird LLP, a job she described on her LinkedIn page as “using my legal education to help some of the good guys win.”

Once in Atlanta she also returned to journalism, building out a successful freelance career focused on books, television, food, culture, and travel. Her work was stylish and eclectic and appeared in a wide range of publications, from The Washington Post to The New York Post, The Week to USA Today, Marie Claire to Redbook, and Roads & Kingdoms, Chowhound, and Lonely Planet News. Her close reading of pocket sewing kits, which hid within it a loving essay on her mother’s astonishing skill with a needle, appeared in The Atlantic in 2016. Most recently, she worked regularly for Fast Company, where she wrote about aspects of culture from Rick & Morty to BTS to Succession to Lana Del Rey.

Frances loved an occasional cocktail; her appreciation of Atlanta’s basement Trader Vic’s, “the hippest unhip tiki bar in the city,” appeared in Roads & Kingdoms. Though her own style was understated, she loved makeup and often spoke of how a friend helped her discover the first Boston outpost, in a suburban mall, of an indie cosmetic company that became the international behemoth MAC Cosmetics. She was passionately interested in fashion, and never missed a Met Gala—but aware of its faults, as her 2016 piece “Do Counterfeit Bags Really Fund Terrorism? There’s a lot of evidence pointing to yes,” made clear.

As Frances wrote of herself, “I am a punk rock girl.” She loved the Smiths, the Ramones, and the Sisters of Mercy. In one of her last Facebook posts, memorialized the release of REM’s album Document 34 years ago, which contains the track, "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”. “My desert island disc. I have gone through two cassette tapes and two albums (at least) from repeated playings,” she wrote.

Frances was deeply political and fiercely liberal; she had faith that people could and should come together to improve the lives of everyone. But her deepest faith was Judaism. She was immensely proud of being Jewish, and immersed in its traditions; she never forgot that her adored mother, Maty, died on Yom Kippur. Recently, an Atlanta friend was diagnosed with cancer. Frances found for her a mezuzah, the doorpost charm that holds a scroll containing the verses, “Hear O Israel, the Lord (is) our God, the Lord is One.” She asked her friend to carry it in her purse, as a token of divine protection and blessing.

Frances loved to travel. She was extremely proud of having gone on her own to China and Tibet for months on a project at the close of her law school years, and she often spoke fondly of visiting Paris and hoped to return. She acquired refrigerator magnets from every place she had been or hoped to go and made them for friends out of pictures she took on her travels. She stashed mementos in treasure boxes and sometimes opened them up again to revel in the memories. She was a passionate fan of the Boston Red Sox, Baby Yoda, and Ted Lasso. She was a knitter, baker, pianist, and before the pandemic, a regular member of a girls-night-out at The Colonnade Restaurant, where her standing order was fried chicken and peppermint ice cream with extra hot fudge.

As she said of herself on her website: “My heroes are Patti Smith, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Emma Thompson, Fran Lebowitz, and Hermione Granger.”

Like all of them, she was a ferocious warrior for dignity and truth. Her friends will miss her very much.

(Obituary written by Maryn McKenna) 

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