Part one. How do you write hard things.
When my Grandma passed away I missed her in a way I didn’t really have language for. I’d walk into stores and buy something just to have a reason to tell the salesperson a story about her. Someone wise told me grief is love with nowhere to go. That stuck with me more than anything else anyone said that year (like “at least she lived a long life” or “she’s still with you”. True. Thanks. But I miss her).
So I started writing whenever I was said, usually in the mornings when I used to Skype with her (yes, the old-age home had Skype not Facetime).
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about writing through grief. It’s genuinely therapeutic, but at some point you have to pull it back. I wrote every last breath my Grandma took. All of it and every detail of those ten days in the dementia ward. It helped me to write it but a lot of that didn’t make it into the book in the end. There’s a real difference between what helps you process something and what a reader actually wants or needs.
My advice if you’re trying to write something hard, write like nobody is ever going to see it. That’s how you get the raw stuff. My favourite sentences in the book are the ones that started as pages I never expected anyone to read e.g. “the wind blew so hard that pieces of the sky began to fall.” This is how I felt when I realized she was dying. That the sky was going to actually fall on me.
The other thing I didn’t expect was that writing a character based on someone you loved and lost can actually help you let them go. I needed to process those ten days with my Grandma, and then separately I needed to process that she was gone. There were moments where I’d reach a junction in the story and know my Grandma would have done A, but the character needed to do B for the story to work. Choosing B, every time, was its own small step towards letting her go.
Part two. How do you write your own family’s story.
Every single family has a story. Not all of them are as wild as the one that got told at our Shabbat table about the great-aunt from Golders Green in London who married the Chief Justice of Zanzibar.
But every family, especially Jewish families, carries raw material. Events like the Holocaust and others of that scale, belong to some families and not everyone. The smaller markings of a good story e.g. love, immigration, loss, scandal, faith actually make a book worth reading and those belong to everyone.
I am always clear that this is a work of fiction. The bones of the story are true but the connective tissue has creative license, because it has to go into someone’s heart and mind, and that is a key difference between historical fiction and memoir.
Someone once likened historical fiction to a pearl necklace. Each pearl on its own is true but stringing them together creates something uniquely new. This is how I hold my true north when I write my second novel. Lots of true pearls and gems, strung together to tell a new story.
So that’s the honest answer to one line on WhatsApp.
This is the first of many. If you’ve read The Spoon and the Sea and you’ve got a question of your own, send it. I’d love to answer your question too.