Thank You Dear Readers for Sharing Your Grief

At a bookstore last autumn, an older woman waited to approach me until the last person had left the reading. 

“Thank you,” she said, “for writing so honestly about your mother’s death.” 

She told me that her mother had died 40 years ago, and she had always struggled to relate the experience to her husband. She thanked me for writing a novel that had helped him understand. 

I wrote “Boy From the North Country” to transform my own grief into a tribute to my mother, who raised me in the woods in the Hudson Valley, where we lived with our chickens, sheep, dogs and horse. She first gave me my love of books, reading aloud to me on summer afternoons, her voice changing tone and temperament like the actress she had once been in 1970s New York, where she studied with Stella Adler and the eccentric painter Norman Raeben, the youngest child of Sholem Aleichem.

At nearly every stop on my book tour the last year since it was published, readers have shared with me about losing a loved one and feeling isolated in grief.  

My mother herself understood that the stories we tell about our lives have the power to undermine or heal our sense of self. We can tell the story of our life, she often said, with love or bitterness, resentment or redemption, anguish or faith. 

She worked as a holistic health practitioner, drawing on training in psychology, meditation and nutrition to help other people live more meaningful lives. She often began her work by asking a new patient to tell the story of their life. In an essay she wrote called “Thoughts on Love from a Happy Woman,” my mother shared:

“The very wise Mister Rogers said, ‘Frankly, there isn’t anyone you couldn’t learn to love once you’ve heard their story’ and that is true, in my experience. I listen to people’s stories all day long, and my heart fills with love for each of them. Whatever they are going through, for whatever questions they are seeking answers, I recognize that it takes incredible vulnerability to ask for help, and I am so humbly fortunate that they are asking me.”

When I was in my mid-20s, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and I came home, after living most of the last seven years in Oxford, London, and Berlin, to be with her. We spent evenings smoking her medical marijuana and talking about our lives. We read aloud to one another from Ginsberg, Basho, and “Harry Potter.” 

After her death I felt dislocated by grief, unable to focus on ordinary conversation. One place I felt comfortable was within stories that confronted grief intimately: Amos Oz’s memoir “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” 

Slowly, I began to write a novel drawn from my mother’s life, set between her bohemian days as a young woman in the 1970s New York art world and our time together at the end of her life. Each day I wrote felt like one more I was spending with her. “Boy From the North Country” was published on September 16, on my mother’s eighth yahrzeit. 

For years, I had told myself that I was writing a private tribute to her, even after I knew the novel would be published. But on the road the last year, as readers shared their own memories of loved ones, I felt my personal experience giving way to something like a collective shiva. At more than 100 events, many in Jewish communities, I have often felt that the willingness of strangers to share vulnerably from their lives has transformed an ordinary book event into a ritual gathering, open to all, where grief is held collectively rather than borne alone. 

“We are here,” my mother used to say, “to take the pieces of the universe we have been given, burnish them with love, and return them in better condition than we received.”

I never wanted her death to be a piece of my universe. Yet I am overwhelmingly grateful for the readers who have joined me this last year, burnishing our memories with love, speaking the names and telling the stories of those who made us who we are.