Blog Archives
It Wanted To Become A Novel Instead
Before Closure follows a family whose lives are turned upside down when the matriarch of the family leaves her almost forty-year marriage. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The story has been in various stages of development for more than fifteen years. Frankie’s storyline was originally inspired by my own heartbreak. I drove past the house I had once shared with my ex, saw that it was for sale, and was overwhelmed by the memories it stirred. By the time I got home, the rough outline of the story was already in my head, and the first draft came together remarkably quickly. It began as a screenplay because I wanted to showcase Central Iowa in a way rarely seen on film, building the story around locations I thought deserved to be on screen. I also have an estranged relationship with my own father, so I wanted to write an idealized father figure who was loving without being perfect. During the pandemic, while caring for my mother through the final year of her life, I needed somewhere to escape at the end of difficult days. I pulled the screenplay out of a drawer and discovered it wanted to become a novel instead.
The rotating viewpoints allow readers to understand each character’s private struggles. Why was it important to tell the story through multiple voices?
The rotating viewpoints came about because it started as a screenplay, and I was writing with an ensemble in mind rather than just one main character. When I started working on the novel, I saw this as a way to explore love, fear, pain, family, betrayal, and unexpected connection through a kaleidoscope rather than a single lens.
What did you want readers to understand about the difference between loving someone and being able to let them go?
I wanted readers to understand that love and holding on are not the same thing. We often mistake sacrifice, rescue, or hope for love, when sometimes the most loving act is accepting that another person’s journey belongs to them, not to us. Letting someone go isn’t an act of indifference. It’s often the hardest expression of love because it requires us to surrender the illusion that we can change someone through our own persistence. We can offer compassion, forgiveness, and an open door, but we can’t live another person’s life or make their choices for them. In many ways, Before Closure asks whether closure is something another person gives us, or something we choose for ourselves.
What do you hope readers who have experienced family fractures or unanswered questions take away from the novel?
I’ve often said that I’m a storyteller with one goal: to make people feel less alone. If someone finds themselves in these pages, feels that tingle of recognition, and realizes how weirdly, wonderfully, beautifully complicated life and love can be while also believing, even for a moment, that maybe it’s going to be okay, then I’ve done my job. We don’t always get the answers we’re looking for, but that doesn’t mean the journey isn’t worth it.
Author Links: Amazon | Goodreads
In three days, Clayton is convinced his wife will return. It will be their fortieth wedding anniversary, and he believes she’ll come back to celebrate and rebuild what’s been broken.
Frankie and Jules aren’t so sure. Frankie has gone numb in the wake of his own relationship’s collapse, and Jules is barely holding a fragile marriage together. As one Iowa summer weekend unfolds, each of them must face an invitation to rethink the future they were expecting.
Told with sharp insight and quiet compassion, Before Closure is a tender portrait of love stretched thin, the burden of unspoken truths, and the messy grace of daring to live.
Before Closure
Shadley Grei’s Before Closure is a warm, sharp-edged contemporary family drama about the Parker family, whose carefully maintained routines unravel after Carol leaves her husband of nearly forty years without warning. Seven months later, Clayton remains convinced she’ll return for their anniversary, while their adult children, Frankie and Jules, wrestle with losses and doubts of their own. Set over one emotionally crowded weekend in Iowa, the novel turns an abandoned farmhouse, a struggling coffee shop, and a Christmas-in-July celebration into stages for a family deciding what comes after waiting.
Grei’s strongest choice is giving each Parker a life that feels larger than Carol’s disappearance. Frankie, a gay man approaching forty, is grieving a breakup, the loss of his former partner’s children, and a long history of depression. Jules is juggling motherhood, marriage, resentment, and the fear that she may have inherited her mother’s restless heart. Clayton’s certainty that Carol will come home is heartbreaking, but it’s also recognizable as a survival strategy. The rotating perspectives let readers see how love can hold a family together while also keeping its members from saying what they most need to say.
Although the story deals with abandonment, infidelity, depression, aging, and fractured relationships, its tone stays lively through teasing dialogue, awkward encounters, and wonderfully specific family humor. Grei understands how people use jokes when honesty feels too exposed, and the comedy gives the painful scenes room to breathe. One line captures the novel’s emotional direction especially well: “Maybe they’re not falling apart. Maybe they’re falling in place.” That idea becomes the book’s center. Closure isn’t presented as a neat explanation from the person who caused the hurt, but as the gradual decision to stop arranging your life around an answer that may never arrive.
Readers who enjoyed Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove will recognize a similar blend of grief, humor, community, and late-life reinvention, though Before Closure spreads its emotional focus across an entire family rather than one central character. It also carries the intimate messiness of an ensemble dramedy, where romances, sibling grudges, old friendships, and impulsive mistakes overlap. It will appeal to adult readers who enjoy character-driven stories, complicated but loving families, queer protagonists, and emotional plots that still make space for laughter.
Before Closure works because it treats moving forward as a practical, imperfect act rather than a grand revelation. Its characters make questionable choices, hurt people they love, and occasionally stumble into exactly the conversation they’ve been avoiding, but they remain easy to care about. Grei’s conversational prose and affectionate attention to small domestic details make the Parker family feel lived-in, and the final pages offer an ending that’s satisfying without tying every emotion into a decorative bow. This is an engaging debut for readers who like heartfelt contemporary fiction with humor, romance, family tension, and the courage to ask whether closure must come from the person who left.
Pages: 274 | ASIN : B0FKHJVHSG
