Francine Prose on Death and Grief by the Lake

(Originally published in the Denver Post in October 2008)

In Francine Prose’s novel “Goldengrove”(HarperCollins, $25), the drowning death of 17-year-old Margaret rips her sister Nico and her parents apart with grief. In her tragic and illuminating new fiction, Prose uses Margaret’s death to explore how a family both fails and succeeds to come to terms with a sudden tragedy.

For Margaret, the summer in upstate New York was her last one before she would have left town for college. A sensual beauty, Margaret was a budding torch singer with a rebel boyfriend and a sister who idolizes her. When she drowns in the lake in front of the family house, the 13-year-old Nico is devastated. The girls’ mother submerges her grief in a addiction to painkillers and the father obsessively researches a 19th century doomsday cult, becoming more and more distant.

For Prose, the first part of the new novel was an interest in precocious girls like the doomed Margaret. “I went to a very conservative high school,” said Prose in an interview at a diner near her Manhattan home. “The nurse checked the girls every day to see that they were wearing stockings. Quite a number of students in the years ahead of me would have fit Margaret’s bill, but there wasn’t one in particular. I was thinking about the experience of looking up to the older girls.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time around teenagers,”noted Prose. “I was one, then I had my two sons. A lot of the experience of writing about Nico was trying to recreate what it was like to be a 13-year-old girl. I reread ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ and I went out and looked at friend’s daughters, to see how they were acting. Kids are often capable of being 14-years old and 40-years old at the same time.”

The 60-year-old Prose is the author “Household Saints” and 13 other books of fiction. The recent publication of “Goldengrove” comes after a busy summer as the president of the PEN American Center, a chapter of the world’s oldest human rights and literary organization. During the Beijing Olympics, her group championed the cause of more than two dozen Chinese writers being persecuted by the Chinese government.

For the setting of the novel, Prose tapped into her own teenage experiences of unsupervised trips with others kids to lake houses, including the exploding teenage hormones.

“In high school, I would visit friends who had lake houses, and there was always something so sexy and unsupervised about the visits,” said Prose. “When friends learned how to drive, we’d take trips to the lake houses. Sometimes the parents were there, and other times they were not.”

The odyssey of “Goldengrove” allowed Prose to explore teenage lies and fabrications. “One of the things the book is about is teenage lying, and like every teenager, I was an expert at it,” she said. “So were the girls in the novel. You were counting on parental distraction. In this case, the parental distraction was a hideous grief that is so intense that the parents can’t be blamed for being distracted. The parents are suffering. Everyone in the novel is suffering. So much of the story for me is how people deal with suffering.”

In the novel, Nico makes the comment that instead of their grief drawing her family together, it blew them apart. “There are two ways grief can go,” explained Prose. “It can pull people together or it can blow them apart. Nico’s family is essentially a happy family, and regardless of what Tolstoy says, happy families are not all alike. The family has to deal with a sudden, horrible loss, and the extent to which you are not equipped to deal with this grief determines how your family will go on after this.”

Nico’s grief is made much worse by the fact that Margaret drowned while Nico was with her. “For Nico, death is obviously a great mystery and she’s trying to deal with the mystery of absence and loss,” she said. “It’s a human inability to address the idea of ‘How could this person be here, then now not be here?’ You can’t get your mind around it.”

The second half of the novel is consumed by Nico’s strange involvement with Aaron, Margaret’s boyfriend. The two of them torturously act out events from Margaret’s lost life. Nico’s hard ride into adolescence comes with the realization that her parents can’t save her anymore.

In the hands of a lesser writer, Aaron’s bizarre and dangerous relationship with Nico would be just a sick scenario. Prose, however, makes Aaron’s grief real and palpable, explaining some of his unacceptable behavior.

“The boyfriend Aaron is also doubly unable to deal with Margaret’s death,” said Prose. “I had to make his character sympathetic, for I knew that if he was some creepy older guy going out with a 13-year-old girl, the novel would fall apart. When I realized that he was in his own state of grief and trying to reverse what had happened, his character came together for me.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Meghan O’Rourke on the Death of Her Mother and Her Year of Mourning

On Christmas Day 2008, the poet and critic Meghan O’Rourke’s mother Barbara died of cancer at the age of 55, throwing O’Rourke into a tailspin of grief. Using her journalist’s eye, O’Rourke started exploring her own mourning for the web magazine Slate. The result was a searing, individual picture of the writer’s grief and how her family coped with their loss.

In her book “The Long Goodbye”(Riverhead, $26, 320 pp.), O’Rourke takes an unflinching yet poetic look at her mother’s fatal battle against cancer and her own overpowering grief. O’Rourke writes with brutal honesty about the unbearable pain of losing her mother and her attempts to process it during that first year. Along the way, O’Rourke creates a vivid portrait of her mother as a beloved parent and teacher. O’Rourke also realizes that as the eldest child, she must take some responsibility for her father and younger brothers.

O’Rourke, 35, is the author of the award-winning poetry collection “Halflife" and is a columnist for Slate. She spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from Marfa, Texas.

Q. Your writings on grief started in your Slate column seven weeks after your mother’s death. How did you make this decision to address your grief?

A. There are two answers. First, after my mother died, it was very difficult or me to focus on anything deeply. I was immersed in remembering her. The second answer is pragmatic. I was very far behind on my column because I had been taking care of my mother. I told my editor I was thinking about grief, and she said, “Why don’t you write about it?” It was not something I would have done if I didn’t have encouragement.

Q. At times, you write harshly about yourself in the first months after your mother’s death, saying “Grief is not ennobling me,” listing your selfish and needy qualities. Why?

A. I had never planned to write a memoir, but as I got deeper into it, I felt my obligation was to render the experience in as three-dimensional a manner as possible. I had to bring the same scrutiny to myself, to examine myself almost as a character in a novel. The act of writing became part of the act of mourning.

Q. You were with your mother at every stage in her two-and-a-half-year battle with cancer, including giving her hospice care at the end. Why did your grief blindside you?

A. As I said in my book, the act of someone dying is very different from them being dead. There was no way to prepare for my mother’s death. I’d say to myself, “I will only see her face four more times, three more times.” Then one day, I couldn’t see her face anymore.

Q. In the months after she died, you refer to your relationship with your mother as a romance. What did you mean?

A. It was a romance. My mother was gone and all I could think of was my love for her. When you are romantically pining for someone, you are living with them in your head. I was thinking about her smile, her little moments of kindness.

Q. You note the lack of death rituals in modern American life and how your family made its own. How did you memorialize your mother?

A. What I missed from the rituals was the recognition of loss, not only my family’s loss, but that of the community. The moments that were meaningful were the rituals we made up, where we scattered her ashes as a family.

Though the book ends, my mourning hasn’t ended. I learned that there are no shortcuts to grief, that you have to go through it and feel it. Ending the book, I didn’t want to come to any tidy conclusions. Through my grief, though, there were some ways that I learned a lot and grew.

(This interview ran in the Newark Star-Ledger in April 2011)

John McGahern’s Last Literary Effort in "All Will Be Well"

(Originally published in the Denver Post in April 2006)

By Dylan Foley

“Writing this memoir, I discovered how treacherous the memory is,” said the great Irish novelist John McGahern two weeks before his death on March 30th. “We tend to telescope things that actually took place over a long period of time.”

In one of his last interviews by telephone from his farmhouse in County Leitrim, Ireland, McGahern discussed his powerful and moving autobiography “All Will Be Well” (Knopf, $25), which chronicles his mother’s death from cancer in the 1940s when he was nine and his survival in the house of his abusive police sergeant father.

Like his novels “The Barracks” and “By the Lake,” McGahern’s memoir is a lyrical telling of a lost rural Ireland. The book opens with the intense bond between the writer and his schoolteacher mother Susan, and her battle with cancer. Her death is inevitable and she is all that protects her seven children from the violent rages of her husband Frank.

The author of six novels and three short story collections, McGahern was known as one of Ireland’s most beautiful prose stylists. He wrote about bleak family relationships and the endings in the novels, all set in the Irish countryside, were not usually happy.

McGahern had a bout with colon cancer, but battled it into remission in 2002. The disease came back with a vengeance this year. McGahern had to cancel his American book tour in early March. “My bags were packed, but the doctors told me it was not a good idea to go,” he said.

Despite his terminal illness, the 71-year-old McGahern was an engaging and witty interview subject, reflecting on life with his mother and father from sixty years ago.

“My father was very attractive and handsome, like a movie star,” said McGahern. “In the marriage, he started behaving badly even before I was born. My mother was very religious. She was committed to one man and would think that was her duty.”

The memoir is a clear-eyed account of the abuse in the McGahern family and how the children survived. It is told without melodrama or self pity. Outside his immediate family, Frank McGahern could be a charming figure. At home, he beat his children often without provocation. “He hated when we were at peace or getting along well,” said McGahern. “He had to cause some incident or violence to break up that happiness. The violence was to direct the attention back at himself.”

One of the father’s cruelest acts was to neglect the mother in the last months of her life. The mother and father were living in separate villages 20 miles away, but he rarely visited. The title of the book comes from a bizarre letter that the father sent the dying mother, telling her that all will be well if she put her faith in god.

Three days before Susan McGahern died, her husband sent men to take the children away and to strip her house of all its furniture, except for the room she was dying in. McGahern was forever haunted by the moment that he ran out of her room for the last time.

“It was extraordinary just to leave one room furnished in the whole house,” said McGahern. “All the furniture was taken out. I can still hear those iron beds being banged apart.”

The children were also banned from the funeral. “My father wouldn’t let me go because he wanted to be the lone star of the funeral,” he said.

In a magnificently written, wrenching scene, at the same time that his mother’s funeral begins, the nine-year-old McGahern runs out to the neighboring fields with a clock, following the rituals of the mass minute by minute as his heart breaks.

“It wasn’t very hard to write because it was so vivid,” said McGahern. “It was as vivid as yesterday.”

It was the memory of his loving and nurturing mother that enabled McGahern and his siblings to live through violent and unstable conditions. “We certainly wouldn’t have survived if we didn’t have the years we had with her,” he said.

McGahern and his five sisters and one brother banded together to subvert their father. “We became a small army to ourselves,” he said. “We organized ourselves against our father. Anyone who tried to curry favor with him would be punished by us. He became isolated in his own home, even when we were just 14 or 15.”

The McGahern children would parody the father’s whining and complaining that he had such ungrateful sons and daughters. “We would have these jazz sessions, where we would imitate him,” said McGahern. Imitating someone is like mastery. We used to laugh at him.”

Despite the abuse at home, all seven McGahern children eventually escaped the father. Several of the sisters became nurses in England and others became civil servants in Ireland. The human toll on the children was heavy, especially on the youngest Frank. “Frank did very well in life,” said McGahern. “He was the financial comptroller of the BBC in London, but he never really recovered. He eventually drank himself to death.”

In the memoir, McGahern explores the roots of his life as a writer. His mother’s burning desire was that he become a priest and say Mass for her. He had the epiphany that he would rather be a writer, to be a god of his own fictional world.

McGahern touches on the early scandals of his 1965 second novel “The Dark,” which includes scene of a father sexually molesting his son. The book got him fired from his job as a schoolteacher by the Archbishop of Dublin. “The Archbishop of Dublin was obsessed with impure books and movies,” said McGahern, laughing at the 40-year-old memory. “He didn’t want a writer of impure books in his school.”

“All Will Be Well” has sold 70,000 hardbacks in Ireland. For his only memoir, McGahern resisted embellishment. “The fiction writer’s instinct is to improve and reinvent, but of course you can’t do that,” he said.

Though John McGahern’s death is a loss to the world literary community, he has given readers his final gift, a starkly beautiful memoir of a boy surviving a harsh childhood to become a world-class writer. “McGahern’s “All Will Be Well” has set a high standard to meet for the memoirs that follow.

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Didion’s Raw Meditation on Grief in "The Year of Magical Thinking"

(Originally published in the Denver Post, October 2005)

By Dylan Foley

In December 2003, Quintana Roo Dunne, the daughter of writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, walked into a New York City hospital emergency room complaining of flu symptoms, then suddenly went into septic shock and a coma. Three days later, after visiting the still-unconscious Quintana at the hospital, John Gregory Dunne died a massive heart attack while talking to Didion at their Manhattan home.

In her memoir of the aftermath of her husband’s death, “The Year of Magical Thinking” (Knopf, $24), Didion has written a sharply focused chronicle of her grief and how she dealt with her daughter’s illness. In their 39-year marriage, Didion and Dunne became America’s most prominent literary couple, producing a dozen novels and memoirs apiece and writing screenplays for “True Confessions” and “A Star is Born.” In lucid and clear prose, Didion details her need to function and take care of her daughter, delaying the grieving process. Didion’s short memoir is raw and full of dread, and is destined to become a literary classic on grief and death.

“What happened over the course of the year was the feeling that anything horrible could happen,” said the 70-year-old Didion from her book-lined apartment. “I kept expecting a catastrophe. Crossing the street, I expected to be hit by a taxi. It became hard to move around."

On the day of Denver Post interview with Didion, the author was battling a cold. Tragedy has also not left Didion alone. After 20 months of life-threatening medical conditions, Quintana died of acute pancreatitis on August 29th at the age of 39. Didion’s famous high-cheekboned face is lined and tired. Despite being a newly grieving mother, Didion locked onto the freelance reporter with her liquid brown eyes and an intense interview began.

Ten months after her husband’s death, Didion started the groundwork for the new memoir. “I had no intention of writing a book,” she said. After Quintana got out of the hospital in July 2004, however, Didion started fixating on her husband’s death.

Writing a book that captured the the temporary insanity and the harshness of grief appealed to her. “Grief is an experience that everybody goes through sooner or later,” she said. “I’ve been reading an awful lot of literature at the level of which it happens. Usually it’s after the fact and people write about their grief long after the fact. I thought there would be some value in reading a raw account.”

Didion chronicles her irrational thoughts, like refusing to throw out her husband’s shoes in case he might need them again. She doesn’t move Dunne’s magazines and books he was reading before he died. She creates rituals, a kind of “magical thinking,” the term that forms the title, as if she co uld undo his death.

“Magical thinking is a phrase I first came across reading anthropology,” she explained. “Tribal thinking is magical, and if we do certain things, we can affect events and the crops will come in. Children think that way. ‘If I do such and such, my parents won’t get divorced.’ It becomes very pronounced when you are grieving.”

Didion also explores the literature on death and grieving. One hundred years ago, Americans died in their homes. Now they die in sterile hospitals and hospices. Since the 1930s, she writes, stoicism in grief has become the norm.

“(Grief) has become medicalized,” she said. “Death has been medicalized. It happens offstage. There is a contemporary emphasis on being happy and providing happiness to others. People avoid manifesting grief. It is a strange thing, because you have to deal with it sooner or later.”

Didion had to put her own grief on hold to tend to her daughter. “It was quite an unstable time for me because of Quintana,” she said. “She was in such a grave condition. I had to pretend that John’s death hadn’t happened. I couldn’t deal with them both at the same time. I was crazy but I managed to take care of what needed to be done vis-a-vis Quintana.”

Didion’s memoir is a unadorned tribute to her four-decade marriage to Dunne, where the two writers usually spent 24-hours-a day together, an impossible feat for most married couples. With rueful frankness, she also writes about their fights, including her then-shocking column in Life magazine in 1969 where she wrote they chose going to Hawaii over getting a divorce.

“There wouldn’t be any reason to do the memoir unless it was going to be straightforward,” said Didion. “The sense in which our marriage was a good marriage was in its length. When someone dies, it is very much on your mind the time that you’ve wasted fighting.”

Throughout the book, Didion returns to the moments of Dunne’s death, then mixes in other memories, like the time in 1966 the couple first took their three-day-old adopted daughter home from the hospital or their last trip to Paris. Reviewing the death scene becomes a riveting, recurring moment in the book.

“I didn’t know how to structure the book at first, then I realized the way to do it was to repeat the experience (of the death) for that is the experience of the person who is left,” she said. “You try to recreate what happened. Every time you go back to it, you think of details that you didn’t think of as important. Everything comes into focus.”

Even with Quintana’s death, Didion has no plans to rewrite the memoir. “It was already printed, but going beyond it, it was something I did,” she said. “It’s like revisiting any work. It’s finished. I am not going back to something that is finished.”

In December 2004, a year after Dunne’s death, the magical thinking started to lift and Didion realized she was heading into acceptance of his permanent absence.

“People say that it happens after a year,” said Didion. “There is something in the first year where everything is a reminder of the same day a year before (when the person was alive). It is another reason why you obsessively notice the calendar: “On this day a year ago...’ When the days stop being that long, you realize you are letting go, which is not a good feeling, but it is necessary.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY.