Hello fiction writers, memoirists, and poets!
This week’s Write-minded takes on grief, and why, as our guest Claire Jiménez says, “it’s where language collapses.” Jiménez’s new book deals with loss and grief and what happens in a family in the aftermath of a disappearance of a child, and yet, she weaves in humor and the history of American colonization of Puerto Rico and so much more. Grant and Brooke share their own experiences with grief, and also writing and thinking about grief as it manifests on the page and in the body, and why feeling grief is a gift of the human experience.
Books we love that center grief:
Dear Memory by Victoria Chang
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl
Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
The Grave on the Wall by Brandon Shimoda
Dog Flowers by Danielle Geller
Mother Doll by Katya Apekina
Stay True by Hua Hsu
Partial transcript from the show
Grant: I’m Grant Faulkner, and I’m here with my co-host Brooke Warner, and Brooke, I was quite taken with the novel we’re featuring today What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez, by Claire Jiménez. The premise of the novel is the disappearance of thirteen‑year‑old middle child Ruthy, who disappeared after track practice without a trace. Then one night, twelve years later, Ruthy’s oldest sister Jessica spots a woman on TV in a reality TV show called Catfight. She rushes to tell her younger sister, Nina because the woman calls herself Ruby, and she has a beauty mark under her left eye just like Ruthy’s. That sets the novel in motion. I loved it because it’s one of those novels that contains so many things that are both harrowing and hilarious: everything from reality TV to high school drama to sisterly love to intergenerational trauma to colonialism, gender, motherhood, faith, and more. The one thing that weaves its way through the novel is the subject of grief, which takes different forms in the novel, and which has sparked a lot of thoughts about grief and writing about grief for me. I read that Claire said, “Grief is one of the hardest emotions to write,” and I’d never thought about this, but it struck me as very true. It’s similar to writing about love, I suppose, because you risk going over the top, being too sentimental, too emotional, and in the end, even though grief and love are high-pitched, overwhelming emotions, they’re also subtle, nuanced, and mysterious. I know that grief is obviously a central topic for memoir, Brooke, so I’m curious about your thoughts on the challenges of writing about grief. How do you express grief on the page?
Brooke: I was thinking about our very recent interview with Stacey D’arasmo and the idea that intimacy can be many things, and certainly grief and showing readers your grief is a particular kind of intimacy. And, just like we were unpacking sentimentality, certain emotions, like grief, they’ve been written so much and so well in so many different ways, that I think about grief I feel that extra care needs to be taken on the writers’ part to find new and creative ways to talk about it. Terry Gross recently interviewed Salman Rushdie on Fresh Air, and she said something similar about love, basically that it’s hard not to write something that’s cliché these days, and I felt that was an astute observation, and doesn’t mean we can’t tackle these explorations of grief and love and other universal emotions, but that we must approach it with curiosity and authenticity. Don’t rush it, in other words, and also don’t make your grief overly saccharine, or terminally unique. You want to find those windows into connection with your reader, that’s the intimacy part. As far as how to do that, I think you write from the heart. You explore what grief feels like in your body. You play with metaphor and see if you can find new ways of showing through imagery what that feels like. It’s a tall order, but no one said writing beautiful prose should be easy. I haven’t read the book yet, but I read the Times review of Alexandra Fuller’s new memoir, Fi: A Memoir of My Son, was lauded for its exploration and beautiful writing about losing a son. So I put that out there to say this is a brand new book about loss and grief that people looking for a good memoir on the topic might want to check out.
Grant: I love this advice, Brooke, especially the idea of writing about how it feels in your body, and then approaching it with curiosity and looking at it from different angles, through metaphor and imagery. I was scrolling through Instagram yesterday, and I saw this quote from Jamaica Kinkaid in a meme from the Paris Review. She said, “I suppose that my work is always mourning something, the loss of a paradise—not the thing that comes after you die, but the thing that you had before.” It reminded me of what Sigrid Nunez said in her new novel The Vulnerables: “Something is missing. Something has been lost. I believe this is at the heart of why I write.” I’ve heard it said that every story can be seen as a love story. I’m now thinking that perhaps every story can be seen as a grief story as well. We’re never whole, in other words. We’re always searching for that missing piece and grappling with that sense that we’ve lost something. Grief has been on my mind ever since my father died seven years ago, and you might say I’m studying grief because I’m curious about all of the shapes it takes, and then the way we talk and observe, or don’t observe, death in our culture, and the way it lives on in a person, with its own mind, its own direction. I’m especially intrigued by how solitary a feeling it can be. Joyce Carol Oates said, “Grief is the most humane of emotions but it is a one-sided emotion: it is not reciprocated.” To get a little personal, I’m curious if you’ve had any epiphanies or challenges in writing about your father’s death?
Brooke: I’m not sure if this qualifies as an epiphany, but rather something to do with process, or paying attention. Since the early days, I’ve thought to myself that the only way I’m going to experience my dad again would be in my dreams. I know lots of people who’ve had dream encounters with loved ones, and I’ve already had this experience with two close friends I lost. It hasn’t happened often, but when it’s happened it’s been really profound and very visceral, by which I mean it’s in my body and I’ve woken up feeling like I’ve had an encounter. The first time, I heard his voice, just calling me “Honey,” which was his primary nickname for me, a sort of calling out to me, “I’m here.” The second time was more recent and I was in a store, and every man in there had my dad’s face, and I kept reaching out to them, but as soon as they turned to look at me, it wasn’t him. And after this happened a few times, I ran out of the store and I just wailed. Like full-body keening. So I haven’t been able to do this kind of crying in real life, and I think it’s the mind’s way of processing my grief. But how it affects my writing is that it gives me access to that emotion. I feel it quite in my body even now, days after the dream. I think we have a lot to take from these liminal spaces, and it reminds me of our episode with Tzivia Gover about how to harness the power of our dreams in our writing. I’m not writing about my dad’s death, but I am writing about my friend Sarah’s death—and I think the emotions I’m accessing will show up somehow on the page, that I’ll be closer to them, and while it’s not a pleasant feeling, that keening, I don’t wish I hadn’t had that dream. I feel grateful for it.
Grant: That’s so interesting, how dreaming becomes a form for your grief, and for a depth of sorrow that perhaps life doesn’t truly allow. I’m one of those people who doesn’t remember most of my dreams, so I’m actually envious. I’d love to wake up with that keening, that depth of feeling, because I feel like life doesn’t allow for many things these days. I think we’re losing the art of being sick and taking care of ourselves, and we’re losing the art of mourning and taking care of ourselves. You know, there are so many odd phrases that we say to provide comfort after death. Things like, “time will heal,” and I’ve actually read about studies that say that grief tends to move on after 6 months, which is fine, I suppose, but it’s also very capitalistic in the sense of trying to find ways for grief to pass so you can return to being maximally productive—to start seeking fulfillment again. To shy away from mourning or to try to move on from it is to do a disservice to its significance, though, I think, because it is a sacred moment. I think we tend to shy away from talking about death out of fear because no one wants to say the wrong thing. I think of Hamlet who went mad because of his unexpressed grief. His father died and no one wanted him to talk about it, and it was driving him crazy. This is a big purpose of stories, of course—to allow us to talk about grief, even if just with a book. There’s a great essay in Lit Hub on grief and writing by Onyi Nwabineli, who says, “Grief is love and writing grief in fiction is a work of that love; a vessel for it that is no less vital than anything else in this world.” The act of writing is an act of attempted comprehension. We are so baffled and exhausted by what has happened, we want to imagine that giving words to the unspeakable will make it somehow our own. I’m sure you deal a lot with the narrative healing that happens when people write about grief.
Brooke: Yes, and maybe that’s also why people are drawn to write about their personal experiences of grief. It’s so true that people are weird about grief. I am sad my dad died. I wish he was still here. But it’s hard to talk about losing someone because of other people’s reactions to it sometimes. I wish instead of people saying, “Ohhh, I’m so sorry,” they’d say, “What was he like,” or “What do you most miss about him?” Or even “What was his name?” I understand cultural responses, and why people say platitudes of course, it’s because we don’t know what to say. But that leads into what you’re talking about, Grant, that we don’t have good language, or really even good rituals for grief. We have our memorial services, and that’s basically it. So then why wouldn’t we turn to the page to articulate this profound thing that wants to get processed. Many writers I work with carry profound grief around with them, maybe have been their entire lives. Memoir is an important outlet for that, and there’s a difference between journaling and memoir writing—and so sometimes that purging that needs to happen can happen in the journaling process, then you start to separate out the threads that are universal and not cliche as you delve into the writing that’s for readers. What do you think, Grant—I wonder if you’ve given thought to the why part of writing about grief, and what has been your own experience of writing about grief?
Grant: I love your advice to come up with a better language around grief. Saying “I’m sorry” or “Thoughts and prayers” just feels so insignificant, so I love the idea of pausing and asking for a story or a simple “What do you mist about him or her?” My own experience about writing about grief is centered on this yearning for stories. Both to preserve the person and those memories, but also to create them. Our memories aren’t static things—they move around—so I think writing about grief isn’t just an act of recording, but a vital act of creation. The need to acquire meaning is intrinsic to us, even when that meaning lives only inside the mind, which is why reading and writing about grief is important—and healing, although I don’t know that healing is quite the right word. Elizabeth Gilbert’s thoughts after the death of her partner, Rayya Elias, are revelatory. She writes in The Marginalian: “Grief… happens upon you, it’s bigger than you. There is a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself. And it will be done with you, eventually. And when it is done, it will leave. But to stiffen, to resist, and to fight it is to hurt yourself.” Claire Jiminéz captures so many sides of grief and loss in What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez, so it’s going to be interesting to hear what she says after this short break.
This Week’s Book Trend:
This week’s trend is covering a fast-moving story, so things have already moved past this and now PEN America canceled its awards event this year, stemming from what we talk about here, which is that the organization has been accused of failing to protect Palestinian writers in Gaza. This is a complex environment to navigate, and it's hard for organizations to know what to say—but we're past the point of silence being an okay stance. As a teacher of memoir, I can attest to the fact that silence eats away at you. Silence leaves open too much room for interpretation. It looks like the consequences of their silence for PEN is going to be a pretty big shakeup of their executive leadership.
ABOUT CLAIRE JIMÉNEZ
Claire Jiménez is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories and What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez. She received her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University and her PhD in English with specializations in Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2019, she co-founded the Puerto Rican Literature Project, a digital archive documenting the lives and work of hundreds of Puerto Rican writers from over the last century. She’s currently Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina.