Lara Avery: On Writing About Grief and Growth in Fiction
Lara Avery is the author of three young adult novels for Alloy Entertainment, multiple episodes of branching narrative games for the former FoxNext, and her articles and essays appear in San Francisco Chronicle, Gay Mag, Pollen, ARTNews, and Women In Clothes. She received the 2017 Minnesota Book Award for her young adult novel, The Memory Book.
Lara graduated with a BA in Media and Cultural Studies (Film Focus) from Macalester College in 2010, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi in 2020. You can find her shooting hoops in Topeka, Kansas, and at laraavery.com. Follow her on Twitter and TikTok.
Lara Avery
Shawn Poynter
In this post, Lara discusses her thoughts on the unique double-grief for losing a partner, why writers should look for an audience, and more.
Name: Lara Avery
Literary agent: Alloy Entertainment
Book title: The Year of Second Chances
Publisher: William Morrow
Release date: August 22, 2023
Genre/category: Women’s Fiction
Previous titles: The Memory Book; A Million Miles Away; Anything But Ordinary.
Elevator pitch for the book: A year after her husband’s death, a young widow named Robin gets an email from him with a link to a dating profile, encouraging her to move on. Though she’s reluctant, she slowly finds her stagnant small-town life beginning to change, one date at a time.
Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]
What prompted you to write this book?
The original inspiration was a New York Times column titled “You May Want to Marry My Husband,” by the late Amy Krouse Rosenthal. I was extremely moved by this couple, and my editors and I wanted to explore how the next chapter would go for the widowed spouse, how love and grief intertwine, how someone might go about detangling them.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
End to end, about two years. The kernel of this concept stayed the same, but the main shift happened after I sat down with a widow friend whose husband was a locally idolized public figure in her small town. After he passed, she told me how hard it was to eventually date when she was still seen as “this man’s widow.” When I mentioned this conversation to my editors, we were all like, that’s the story.
Initially we had played with Robin being your typical big city slicker, and I’m glad we complicated that, especially because I had just moved from a small town myself and I know how insular they can be—once you’re perceived one way by everyone, it’s hard to grow in another direction. Though the finished book and the main character are both markedly different from my friend’s experience, my goal was to honor her journey, both in grief and in discovering sides of herself she didn’t know she had.
Another change, kind of funny: Robin was, at one point, going to be the coach of a basketball team. It ended up not being the right fit, but I swear I will write my girls’ basketball twist on Bad News Bears someday!
Were there any learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Though I am acquainted with grief, I have never lost a spouse, so for research about widowhood, I had deep conversations with people, and read as many blogs, memoirs, and novels as I could manage. I learned about so many different shades of grief, so many different ways people have had to say goodbye.
This may seem obvious, but it struck me how different it is to mourn a partner than it is a parent or any other relative, because this is someone you chose. With a relative, you have your memories with them, you have their influence on your life, but with a spouse, you were also (most of the time) actively influencing them, too.
So you not only lose the part of you that was shaped by them, but the part that did the shaping. This double loss—partner and partnered self—is supposed to characterize Robin’s initial feeling of stuckness, and I hope I did it justice.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
If you would have talked to me 10 years ago, I could have never imagined writing about horror movies with such affection. I used to be a huge scaredy-cat. But now it’s one of my favorite genres, and it surprised me how well it seemed to gel with Robin’s particular way of mourning.
It makes sense; so much horror is about isolation and what happens when emotions go unchecked or unacknowledged. The hope in including them was that the movies (like they do for me) help Robin experience fear and anxiety in a safely contained way.
Another surprise is that they also (eventually) help her tap into her creativity.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope grieving readers feel held and seen by Robin’s story, and I hope it helps all readers remember it’s never too late to shift their perspective on the world, and on themselves.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Always look for an audience, even if they’re not real or they’ll never read what you write. Figure out that someone you’re writing for and write to them.
While there’s no shortage of writing advice, it’s often scattered around—a piece of advice here, words of wisdom there. And in the moments when you most need writing advice, what you find might not resonate with you or speak to the issue you’re dealing with. In A Year of Writing Advice, the editors of Writer’s Digest have gathered thoughts, musings, and yes, advice from 365 authors in dozens of genres to help you on your writing journey.