In a recent review in The Wall Street Journal,  literary critic Sam Sacks observed:

“There is a hole in contemporary fiction that has been noticeable for some time but was especially conspicuous in this year. Novelists….do not like to write about death….Death has become as we imagine sex was to the Victorians: a taboo, unsuitable for mixed company—one of the last unmentionable subjects.”

By “death,” Sacks didn’t mean apocalypse, mayhem, or murder—novels serve those up all the time. He meant death itself, the thing we avoid thinking about until it’s unavoidable, death as it occurs in the midst of real life.

The pandemic has thrust that sort of death in all our faces, made it the grim fodder of the daily news and a personal reality for far too many. But in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, most American fiction remains resolutely escapist when it comes to the subject of individual mortality. This is what philosopher Mark Johnston calls “our ownmost death,” that brute fact that shouts at us that we are not, in fact, the center of the existence we’ve spent our lives experiencing, but a transient particle of it. We may think that climate change deniers are the lowest form of Neanderthal on earth, but most of us are advanced practitioners of the art of denying the even less debatable fact of our own mortality. To talk or write about death as a personal phenomenon may indeed be the last, deepest taboo.

My Wake-up Call

My mother’s sudden death from an E. coli outbreak over a decade ago was my wake-up call to an awareness of my own mortality, and eventually became the emotional foundation of my novel, When We Were All Still Alive. I’d already written a short memoir, Befriending Ending, which related my experience of her last days and what it taught me about death and dying. But that was an exercise in facts and philosophy, and in this piece of fiction I wanted to get at the emotional reality of familial connection, loss, redemption, and solace, and how they interplay throughout life, in a way that a memoir couldn’t. So I started this novel where the protagonist loses the person dearest to him, and he basically has to reinvent himself and his understanding of his own past and future. I suppose it was an attempt to inoculate myself against a kind of loss I hope to God I never have to experience.

I had also reached a point in life where the subject of aging—its many unfairnesses and great consolations—became a focus, and I wanted to try to depict how one couple’s love and friendships change and endure over the span of a lifetime and into late middle age. There are six deaths and four funerals in the book, numbers that surprised me when I took inventory.

Where I Started

I began with a mood, a couple of characters, a husband and wife, and a few commonplace domestic incidents, my notion being that once the reader was really attached to these characters and their life together, I’d kill off the loving wife and see how the survivor coped. My stylistic reference points in this process were two of my favorite novels: Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, a pointillist portrait of a marriage, rendered in brief scenes and small moments; and James Salter’s Light Years, another domestic novel in which the passage of time itself becomes a central theme, almost a character. I studied these books as an act of reverse engineering, the way an auto mechanic might strip an engine, to see how their authors did it. They’re both deeply melancholic books, yet utterly uplifting in their effect, and that was the alchemy I hoped to reproduce.

Changes From My Readers

The narrative started out in conventional third-person omniscient voice, but over multiple drafts evolved into the first person, which seemed more engaging and immediate. Luckily, a discerning early reader complained that there were too many scenes that the “I”-figure narrator couldn’t possibly have known about, and I was convinced to go about the surprisingly difficult process of shifting the entire manuscript back into third person. (Note to self and others: don’t try this at home. Think through your narrative voice in advance and stick to it. The tone of much of what you’ve written will sound wrong when your protagonist is no longer the narrator. Not to mention all those pronoun changes.)

Another reader of an early draft thought the wife was too perfect, so I gave her what ended up being her fatal weakness. And it finally dawned on me that her death, occurring late in the book, could come not only as a surprise to the reader but as a cheap melodramatic trick, and that it needed to be the explicit premise of the story rather than its climax. If I wanted to write about death, I had to begin with it. This change also required that the time sequence become nonlinear, circling back to where the narrative began before it moved forward again, which seemed a nice reflection of the husband’s emotional journey out of grief. (I say this now, but what seem rational, obvious changes in retrospect were for the most part highly intuitive and irrational in the actual process of writing.)

The Risk of Writing from an Interior Emotional Space

One risk of writing from this sort of interior emotional space is that the reader may be tempted to assume that my protagonist, Conrad, is me, that his wife Sarah is my wife (though mine is very much alive), and that each of the others in the novel’s cast of characters stands for someone in the real world—a classic roman a clef. But if you’ve attempted to write fiction, you know the oddly independent life that your characters assume. You know what they look like, how they walk, talk, and what they like to eat. And then, when you think you’ve got them fully imagined and all you want them to do is act out a more organized, interesting version of your own life, they take on this stubborn, inviolable existence that you can’t quite predict, much less control. Your life and theirs diverge, as real lives do.

Thomas Wolfe perhaps put it best: “Fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.”