A Matter of Life and Death

My novel is about death, and grief, and life, and how all three of those very big things exist alongside each other. It’s about our human hope that life doesn’t end with death, that the spirits of our loved ones live on after they leave their bodies. It’s about pain and loss and sadness and how we climb out of the depths of despair to continue living after people who are important to us are gone.

A little light reading.

I live in privilege. I grew up in safety and health and with means and opportunities. I have been thunderstruck when someone I love died, because it was rare. I understand that around the world or even in my own neighborhood, other people are much more accustomed to death and loss and tragedy, and have vastly different attitudes and ways of dealing with them.

But I am fifty years old now. Time has broken down those privileges and brought death to the forefront much more often. Many of my friends are this age, too, so now our conversations  include stories of deaths. Deaths that are sudden and tragic and shocking, or a long time coming yet still tragic for the holes they create for the people left behind. And because I’ve been working on this novel for so long, those stories leak into my work.

It’s a very heavy project, sitting down with my manuscript every weekend, making sense of my editor’s notes and wading through the emotions that my characters experience, because as I tell their stories I feel their feelings. Not every chapter is about loss, of course; some of them are hopeful or funny or sexy or full of descriptive detail. But because this is my first novel, I have poured everything I know into it. I haven’t tried to separate real life from this story. Even though it is fiction, my novel is informed by my own experiences.

One of these experiences is a conversation I had with the late Jane Gassner, my original writing coach and developmental editor. It was June of 2021. I was officially done with my first draft, after laboring over it for years. Jane was with me all of those years, listening to me whine about it, reading early drafts, guiding me and coaxing me and sometimes sternly admonishing me for judging myself or for not going deep enough.

That day last June she was already feeling unwell, so I drove across town and picked her up and took her out to lunch. It wasn’t COVID, but she thought it was pneumonia or something, because she had trouble breathing. (Realizing only just now: this is exactly how my grandmother’s fatal lung cancer started back in 1992. How could I have been so obtuse?)

After lunch, at her kitchen table, we talked about What To Do Next with my novel. I wanted to make sure it made sense, that there were no plot holes or inconsistencies, that the character development was strong, that the reader gets lost in the story. In other words, I wanted to make it great. I read so many novels that are intimidating in their greatness, that transport me and move me and stir such envy in me. I think “I wish I could write like that.” When I would say those words to Jane, she would say “My darling, you can.” 

So. I’m crying as I write this, because I miss her so. She had such a way with words.

In You Will Be Just Fine, there are two main characters who were best friends: Joanne who is alive, and Caren who is dead. It switches back and forth between their points of view (POVs) so we experience the normal mundane world of a working mom, and the completely other world of a newly deceased soul. Jane told me bluntly, “I don’t think you need Joanne’s POV. I am much more interested in Caren’s world, as I am closer to hers than to the life of a mother with young children.”

I remember laughing a little, trying to dismiss that concept, because a) I am 100% attached to both of my main characters and b) I could not bear to think about Jane ever dying.

When it was confirmed that she was sick with lung cancer, we continued to discuss the project but it was clear Jane could not continue working on it. I hired a different editor, who said I could cut Caren’s POV. The life of the working mother and how she deals with the loss was so much more interesting to her. And guess what: she is much younger than Jane was and is a working mother.

I guess that means that my book has something for everyone. What’s most important is that in this story, the impenetrable barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead gets crossed. Isn’t that what so many of us dream of?

Both editors urged me to identify my theme, so I have since embraced that the theme is the fine line between life and death and how closely they coexist, and how our lost loved ones live on because we make it so. In the words of my dead character, Caren:

I will be in [their future] only as a memory that fades over time, only flaring up when Joanne comes across a photo of us together, or a video, all of us captured in a moment caught in a digital recording. That love never goes away.