How I Grieve Through Writing (Part 1 of many)

Writing is one of the biggest tools I have for processing loss.

Hello everyone,

I hope you are having a wonderful August! It’s hot where I am in Brooklyn.

So far on The Plot Doctor, I’ve posted about writing in a variety of ways—finances, tutorials, and plenty about the publishing industry. But I haven’t really told you much yet about the role of writing in my own life, specifically about the relationship between writing and grieving for me.

If I had to pick one thing in my life where I deal with the loss and grief of being human —it’s my writing.

I don’t know what I’d do without writing on this front. To me, books—memoirs, novels, essays too—are these incredibly flexible, roomy, oh-so-human spaces where we get to be in the messiness of our lives. Where we can cry and rage and laugh and hope and play and dream and love and so many other important things. Where we can have the conversations with people who are no longer with us via the characters in our novel, or conjure those we’ve lost on the page in a story about them in our lives, and where we can lean on words, plots, protagonists, narratives, whatever it is we are writing to escape into another world for a while, or even to escape back into a time in our lives when those people were alive and well.

In fact, I became a novelist because I lost my mother 20 years ago.

During that time, I was a mess, I was devastated, I was flailing, I was struggling in my job as a professor, my father wasn’t okay, my marriage was faltering, and I remember not understanding how people manage to move from day to day and go to work and act like normal when they’ve just lost someone so important to them.

One day, in the middle of the fog and sadness of my grief and just a few months after my mother had died, I sat down and started writing a novel about a girl named Antonia. She lived above her family’s Italian market and went to Catholic school and her greatest desire was to become the first ever living saint. She was chatty and funny and loved to cook and I loved to sit down and be with her on the page.

Soon I realized that Antonia was based on my mother as a girl.

I gave Antonia all that my mother was in life—her big personality, her loud laughter, her obsession with the saints, her sense of humor, her skills in the kitchen. And I gave her all that I was feeling—all the yearning and wishing that I could have just one more day, one more hour, even one more minute with my mother again.

I had no idea what I was doing, really, writing a novel. I’d never taken a class, I didn’t know how to write dialogue or carry a story over the course of several hundred pages. I was just stumbling along, chapter to chapter, writing without worrying to much about what I was doing. All I knew was that sitting down to write Antonia was the only thing keeping me going. Antonia’s antics cracked me up, she made me laugh, and she was just so powerful—Antoni’s story became my happy thought during that very dark time.

And I just let myself have her. I let myself have that novel I was writing like it was a gift to myself—because it was actually a gift I was giving to myself. I needed that novel to get through that time. Writing Antonia was helping me breathe, was helping me to put one foot in front of the other, was giving me something to look forward to as I tried to get through each day. Most of all, sitting down to write Antonia was like offering myself a chance to be with my mother again. This was joyful and also precious. I was grateful to have this book I could go to each day. Even though I didn’t quite realize it at the time, now when I look back I can see how that book pulled me through that awful year after I lost my mother.

Antonia eventually became THE POSSIBILITIES OF SAINTHOOD, my very first novel, which is (perhaps ironically) a very funny, giddy story.

Now, many many books later, I can see clearly that writing is how I grieve. Sometimes it’s by writing something that will crack me up because laughter is scarce and I need to let myself have a bit of humor to break up the sadness, and sometimes writing allows me to confront a loss I’ve yet to truly face, and sometimes writing is how I talk to the dead (more on that another time). Regardless of the role writing is serving toward the end of grieving and healing, what I do know is that I write my way through to the other side.

I’ll be posting quite a bit more about this theme, since it’s one of my favorite topics related to writing, and I’m very interested in books (novels and memoirs especially) and writing (in general) as tools for grieving, as spaces to grieve, and writing as a life-giving activity when all else seems lost. In the last year, I’ve been grieving all over again, so this subject has been on my mind, but I’ll share about that another time.

So that’s a little more about me, and what writing means to me and why I can’t do without it in my life. I hope you enjoy the last weeks of summer, that if you’re grieving too for whatever reason that you let writing bear some of that burden for you. And please know that I’m so glad you’re here, and that we’re all in this writing thing together!

Love, Donna

(Coming soon, more on the 90-Day Novel (or memoir!) program I’ll be sponsoring this fall.)