How Reading and Writing Fiction Can Unlock Doors to Processing Grief and Loss
Raise your hand if a story ever made you cry.
And I don’t mean happy tears. I’m not talking about empathy or misty-eyed nostalgia. I mean those messy sobs out of nowhere—the kind that erupt from a secret reservoir of grief that you’ve buried or ignored.
(Writing Through Grief in a Rom-Com.)
Case in point: When, as a fiction judge, I received Gerard Kelly’s The Boy Who Loved Rain, I found myself unexpectedly snot-crying within a few pages. Normally, my role requires a posture of detachment that allows me to sift through dozens of nominees quickly, and this book was one of many in my pile. But then his female protagonist discovered a suicide pact hidden in her teenaged son’s room. And I fell apart.
Grief. It’s a mysterious thing. It’s not always connected to one specific loss. It’s often hard to map. Even the famous “five stages” (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) don’t follow a linear path, nor do they happen to everyone, in the same order, every time. Sometimes the closer you look at grief, the harder it is to see. Which is why it’s tempting to stash it in the vault of unresolved pain, slam the door, spin the lock, and walk away.
But here’s the thing: Fiction can crack the code. It can slip by our usual defenses. Dressed up as “entertainment,” stories sneak in via the unguarded, unsuspecting imagination until, suddenly, the vault is standing wide open.
Years before my outburst of unexpected tears, I’d lost a friend to suicide. I hadn’t thought about it in decades, but reading Kelly’s book was like getting the call that my friend was missing all over again. And now I was the mother of two boys, which layered fear on top of trauma on top of guilt on top of all the nameless things with which survivors (and mothers) torture themselves. By staying busy and detached, I’d managed to keep my vault secure. But a story broke through.
As a writer, I should’ve been prepared. After all, it isn’t just the reading of stories that can unlock hidden emotions. Writing can too. Indeed, much of the world’s greatest literature—its poetry and sacred texts, its epics and ballads—has been forged in the fires of human suffering.
Some writers use the craft intentionally for this purpose. Take, for example, the late Madeleine L’Engle, winner of the 1963 Newbery for A Wrinkle in Time. L’Engle journaled extensively as a way to process events such as the loss of loved ones—and she encouraged her writing students to do the same. “I have been keeping these notebooks of thoughts and questions and sometimes just garbage (which needs to be dumped somewhere) since I was about nine, and they are, I think, my free psychiatrist’s couch.”[1] She went on to publish some of that material in a series of memoirs called The Crosswicks Journals, which are among her best-loved nonfiction works.
Even though I admire L’Engle tremendously, my experience has been very different. I belong to the category of writers who don’t intentionally set out to process emotions through their craft. Instead, emotions surface along the way.
For instance, when I first got the idea, 20 years ago, for what eventually became my debut YA novel, the last thing on my mind was using it to wrestle with my own grief and loss. Instead, characters with interesting problems popped into my head, and I wanted to see what would happen to them. Like C. S. Lewis (author of The Chronicles of Narnia), I began with a “supposal.”
Suppose an American teenager—who secretly wants to believe in fairytales—meets her British grandmother for the first time. There’s some mystery as to the estrangement between the mother and grandmother. Even worse, the grandmother’s erratic behavior is deeply troubling. By day, she’s cold and distant, averse to any mention of magic; but by night, a spell seems to break, and she acts like a queen of fairyland. Something, long ago, must’ve shattered her heart…but what?
During the 20 years in which I chipped away at the novel, the act of writing itself began to reveal what the story was really trying to tell me. It wasn’t just an intriguing supposal: It was about my own family. It was about my maternal grandmother, who was diagnosed with cancer when I was 14. More importantly, it became a way to process my experience of bewilderment and powerlessness as her mental health deteriorated during those months she lived with us before her death.
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So, I kept writing, on and off, as time allowed. Needless to say, a lot can happen to a writer in 20 years. My husband and I moved eight times. We finished graduate school and then became parents of young children. We lost several family members, including his dad and stepmom to two separate terminal illnesses in the same year. And then, also that same year, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Suddenly, I wasn’t writing simply from my teen protagonist’s perspective. I was now experiencing everything from the viewpoint of the mother and grandmother. I’d entered the realm of grownups who must try to navigate trauma while also shielding their children from carrying more than they should bear.
With every turn in my emotional journey, my novel kept speaking to me. The craft of writing itself became a way to process what I couldn’t always look at head-on. And the book grew richer and more complex with each new layer.
As fiction writers, we can choose to ignore the emotions that emerge and simply focus on crafting a really entertaining tale. But–as in real life–grief and loss have a way of showing up uninvited. Also–as in real life–those experiences can insist on becoming inseparable from the story we thought we were telling. But if we allow grief to crack the code of our own hidden vault, it can open the door to honest expressions of our shared humanity, both for ourselves and our readers.
The month in which I was diagnosed with cancer, I finally, at long last, finished my novel. A few weeks later—my chest still bound with gauze—I sent the document to a print shop and had it spiral-bound as a surprise anniversary gift to my husband. That night, he sat down and began to read.
You can guess what happened next.
Check out Sarah Arthur’s Once a Queen here:
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[1] Madeleine L’Engle Herself, ed. by Carole F. Chase (Penguin Random House, 2001, 2018), p. 89.