Why Do You Write About Death?

I understand the question. If I Stay, the book that launched my career was a novel about a teenage girl who after being in a horrific car accident with her family, is outside her body, deciding whether to live or die. Other books of mine have grappled with the aftermath of suicide, or drug overdose, or have been narrated by a dead man.

(Balancing a Compelling Story With Life Lessons in Middle-Grade Fiction.)

Sometimes the implication in this question is that there is something uniquely dark in my soul. Or the suggestion is that I, like many authors of books for children and young adults, am cravenly and maliciously manipulating teenagers’ propensity for feeling big feelings and doing them actual harm. Many a book has been banned—including mine—because of such dark themes.

A small part of me understands this mentality of fear. I am a mother. I love my kids. I want my children—all children—to grow up happy and healthy and thriving and to never have to face the kinds of extreme hardship I put my characters through. But keeping them from reading about such things in books will not protect them from life’s inevitable heartbreaks. Because, reality is reality and in reality morbidity rates, which have always spiked for young people between the ages of 15 and 24, have surged in recent years, driven by increases in drug overdoses and suicide. We are in the midst of a mental health epidemic among young people, which experts attribute to the perfect storm of isolating technology and the pandemic.

“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” wrote Susan Sontag. “Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

Illness, death, hardship, they are coming for all of us, be it when we are five or 15 or 35 or 85. This is one of the side effects of being alive. And unfortunately, it will happen to young people whether we like it or not. It will happen to our kids whether we pray on it or not. It is a form of magical thinking to think we can protect kids from bad things happening to them by not having them read about bad things happening to other people. It’s also a form of grandiose thinking to believe that books can literally save young people from the maladies depicted in books. They cannot.

But here’s what books that grapple with existential issues can do: They can prepare young people for the emotional hurdles ahead. They can provide a safe dry run for experiencing loss, failure, hurt, rejection. They can practice their responses to hardship and tragedy, including feeling the pain, and moving through it. According to the Yale Child Study Center–Scholastic Collaborative for Child & Family Resilience, reading can relieve stress, boost connections, create empathy and foster a sense of belonging—all of which grow a child’s resilience.

In the past decade, resilience—or, grit as it’s often described—has become a parental obsession with an entire cottage industry of books advising parents, educators, and caregivers on how to build this essential trait. While it’s great for adults to read books about resilience, resilience is built through experience. Some of this will be lived experience that all children will go through, and it’s wonderful that adults have tools to model healthy ways for handling adversity. But some of this can be attained by having young people experience adversity second-hand, through the safety and comfort of a book that evokes the powerful emotions associated with difficulty without actually having to weather the hardship. When young people tell me why my books are so meaningful to them, it’s typically because the strong emotions—all the feels, my readers call them—help them, whether it’s to grapple with some lesser but still painful issue they are going through (say, loss of a grandparent or a friend breakup) or simply because a good catharsis feels good. But mostly they say that my books give them hope.

That’s because when I write about a young woman losing her family in a car accident, I also write about the love of that family that fortifies her to live through that loss. When I write about a young man reeling from his brother’s overdose, I write about how the community comes together to lift him up. When I write about a young woman’s heartbreak at losing her best friend to suicide, I shed light on the secretive nature of depression and mental illness, which allows it to metastasize to often tragic ends. I show my readers that bad things will happen, but there are levels of support and grace and inner strength that often emerge at such times like this that you can never quite imagine until you’ve gone through it. I show my readers that they are never alone. Love and support is out there; they just have to know how to access it. They may feel alone, but they are not. Experiences like love and loss and heartbreak and anger and shame and desire and the whole kaleidoscope of human messiness are universal. If all these other people, fictional and real, can make it through hardship, emerging battle-scarred but maybe wiser, stronger, more full of love and empathy and hope, so can readers.

So back to the original question: Why do I write about death? You’re asking the wrong thing. What you should be asking is, “Why do I write about life?”

Check out Gayle Forman’s After Life here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)