Writing About the Dead

Someone recently asked me if my parents’ deaths freed me to write about them. If anything, I feel an even greater sense of responsibility to our story.

The first time I wrote a book, I showed it to most of my family beforehand—no surprises is one of my hard-and-fast rules when I’m writing a story that includes people I know and love, so I wanted everyone, especially my parents, to have plenty of time to read and react before it was out in the world. I have a new memoir out next month, but my parents will never get to see it. And the one remaining person in my adoptive family I would have wanted to show it to ahead of publication died a few weeks ago.

My aunt, my mother’s older sister, was my last link to my adoptive family. She could be acerbic and blunt, and sometimes we butted heads—I could not have a political discussion with her without wanting to throw something. But I also remember her as one of the few relatives in a very large family who ever bothered to get to know me or find out what I was interested in when I was growing up. She would send me books, take me shopping (even though she hated shopping), bring me to plays and operas I would never have seen otherwise. In college, when I needed money to make rent or buy groceries, she would bail me out because she knew my parents couldn’t. Other people might have kept a running tab or thrown it in my face when we quarreled, but she never once brought it up. Even without reminders, I’ve long been aware of what I owe her.

Since my mother died in 2020, my aunt was the only person I could talk to about her who really knew her, who loved and missed her as much as I did. Sometimes I’d go weeks without talking about Mom with anyone—I would want to, but there would be so much I’d have to say, so much context to provide before anyone else could even begin to understand why the memory was important. That energy, when I found I had it, mostly went to the book I was writing. But with my aunt, there were many common points of reference, as well as the kind of shorthand you share with those you have a long history with: Remember when … ? She always said that. You know how your mother could be. When we spoke about those who’d died within two years of each other—my mom, my dad, my grandmother—I wasn’t telling her a story, and she wasn’t telling me one; we were remembering together.

Sometimes, I was struck by how differently we saw and understood and remembered the same person. We were both well acquainted with my mother’s religious devotion, for example, but my aunt always insisted that she should have become a nun, whereas I felt equally certain that Mom would have hated the discipline and the obedience requirements, and therefore would have been a subpar nun, to say the least (sorry, Mom). My aunt had an older-sister view of my mother as being rather hapless, always in need of her guidance, but I remember my mother as a stronger person than that, someone who would make up her own mind and then never be swayed.

I’m often asked how to write about real people, how to capture the fullness of who they are and render that on the page, and my short answer is that you can’t. In the end, you can only write your perspective, how you know them, in all the complexity you can and to the best of your ability. A person is different to every other person who knows them. My relationship with my mother is the foundation and emotional center of my book, yet I know that it is only my story as her daughter: If someone else, such as my aunt, were to write about her, the resulting portrait would be entirely different.

I have been thinking a lot about what it means to recall and share true stories based on memories, particularly memories of our dead. With my entire family gone, I am now the sole carrier of more stories than I could share in my lifetime. There’s no one who remembers my childhood, or what my parents were like when they were younger, or how my grandmother’s house looked at Christmastime; no one with whom a sentence is sufficient to summon a memory. Now, if I want to talk about past events or people I’ve lost, it means trying to do that memory work alone, asking myself questions until I have a grasp on the details, and then re-creating a moment only I have ever seen.

I did not set out to memorialize or eulogize anyone in this book, but to write the story I wanted to tell—one about leave-taking and grief, the broken systems we struggle to navigate while blaming ourselves for not doing so better, the ways we love and try and fail to save one another. Yet I recognize that this book is also a kind of time capsule in which the person I am right now has gathered stories of people I loved who are gone; in that sense, they’ll keep living in its pages. Someone recently asked me if my parents’ deaths freed me to write about them. At the time, I honestly had no idea how to respond. But if they asked me now, I would say that, if anything, I feel an even greater sense of responsibility to my parents, and to all of my dead, and to our story. I’m the only one left with any version of it to tell, and I need to get it right.

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Thank you for reading. I have been unable to write and send regular newsletters while dealing with family matters, but I hope to make it up to you in the coming months.

I have a review-essay in the April issue of The Atlantic, previewed last week in this newsletter. If you missed it, you can read it online here. As ever, subscribers get full access to the magazine and all my writing for The Atlantic, including subscriber-exclusive newsletter editions.

My new book, A Living Remedy, is out on April 4, and you can preorder it anywhere books are sold. (If you want a signed and personalized copy, you can buy one from my friends at Loyalty Books.) I’ll also be going on tour in April and May—if you’re interested in attending a reading/conversation near you, event details can be found here.