The Requirement of Grief shares your experiences with grief and loss as well as the impact of suicide and the resilience of humans to cope with grief and find hope even in the darkest of times. Why was this an important book for you to write?

Initially, I was writing to help myself process the complicated relationship that I had with my sister Alexis. Each time I wrote about something that happened between us or in our family, I thought of it as its own essay. After Alexis died, I came to an awareness that the things I’d been writing were going to be part of a book, and I began to think about how to put these together in a way that would allow a reader to come along on the journey.

Ultimately when you publish a memoir, it has to be a written with an eye toward the reader and the audience, otherwise it’s more of a journal. I spent a lot of time shaping the chapters and choosing a deliberate structure in order to keep the reader engaged and willing to stay with me for 200 plus pages that deal with very heavy topics.

What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?

I’m always telling my son that being a human is really hard. I tell him this because I want him to develop an awareness of the complicated nature of feelings and the fact that it can be quite overwhelming to experience the full range of emotions. I hope anyone who reads this book will come away with an understanding of each character’s perspective (mine, Alexis’s, my parents), and I hope that this understanding will allow readers to expand their capacity for compassion in their own lives. All the characters in this book, especially me, are deeply flawed, but we are also trying to do the best we can.

I appreciated the candid nature with which you told your story. What was the hardest thing for you to write about?

At a certain point while writing, I decided that I needed to include chapters from my sister’s imagined perspective. Once I made this decision, something clicked. It felt right and necessary. I wanted readers to feel that they knew my sister as well as they knew me. After I had written several of these chapters, I was talking to one of my writing mentors and she asked if I’d written the scene of my sister’s death. I hadn’t, but the moment she asked I knew that I needed to.

This was the hardest chapter to write. I had a fixed number of facts. I knew who Alexis called on her last day. I knew that she sat out on the porch in the sun with a glass of wine. I knew the time that my parents had last spoken to her and what they said, and of course I knew what kind of pills the coroner had found in her stomach and the drug levels in her blood. In order to write the rest, I had to imagine what Alexis might have felt on that day; what she might have thought about as she wrote the note she left for us; how she might have decided which pills to take. This was not something I ever expected to write and it was incredibly difficult, but writing it opened something up inside of me, and I think it was an important piece for the reader to have.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from your story?

Loving a family member through any illness, whether it’s cancer or Multiple Sclerosis or even something small like a pinched nerve, is difficult. Illness and pain can change a loved one’s personality and outlook on life. It could feel like you’ve lost the person even while they are still alive. That’s how it felt with my sister. She was there, but she was not the sister I grew up with.

I had a whole host of emotions that cropped up for me while Alexis was alive, and they were not easy feelings to confront. There was a well of anger, resentment, bitterness, and sadness, which left me feeling a great deal of shame and guilt. My hope is that anyone in a similar situation will feel seen as they read, and perhaps less burdened by shame than I was.

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