Grieving has always been a public as well as private act, and lately, it seems, people are increasingly writing memoirs about it.  Two new first-person accounts about coping with the loss of a loved one are Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Widow’s Story,” about the death of her husband, Raymond Smith, (published earlier this month), and Meghan O’Rourke’s “The Long Goodbye,” about mourning her mother (to be published in April). Their books add to a growing genre that includes Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), David Rieff’s “Swimming in a Sea of Death” (2008), Anne Roiphe’s “Epilogue” (2008) and Roland Barthes’s posthumous “Mourning Diary” (2010), to name a few recent examples.  In an e-mail conversation, Ms. Oates and Ms. O’Rourke discussed how they wrote about their own grief and why the literature of loss resonates with readers today. The dialog, which has been edited for length and clarity, began by asking them what led them to write about their experiences.  Meghan O’Rourke: You know, writing has always been the way I make sense of the world. It’s a kind of stay against dread, and chaos. My mother was diagnosed with advanced colorectal cancer in 2006; she was 53, and I was 30. As her disease progressed, I found myself writing down all the experiences we had — the day she got giddily high on morphine at the doctor’s office; the afternoon we talked, painfully, about her upcoming death. It helped me externalize what was happening. After she died, I kept writing — and reading — trying to understand or just get a handle on grief, which was different from what I thought it’d be. It wasn’t merely sadness; I was full of nostalgia for my childhood, obsessed with my dream life and had a hard time sleeping or focusing on anything but my memories. I worried that all this was abnormal.  At some point, I realized that what I was writing might become a book. I knew that I didn’t want that book — which became “The Long Goodbye” — to be merely an account of my suffering, but a reflection of what I saw as the complexity of loss today. Because my mother died when I was 32, I didn’t know that many peers who’d lost a parent. In those first months, I quickly came to feel almost embarrassed by my sorrow. Most people are uncomfortable around loss. Friends talk to you about “getting through it” and “moving on” and “healing.” We shy away from talking about death, not out of cold-heartedness, but out of fear. No one wants to say the wrong thing; and death is scary. I think this is part of why there are so many memoirs and movies about loss: they create a public space where we can talk safely about grief.  Joyce Carol Oates: Writing always seems so private — I can never quite believe that anything I write, especially in longhand, on scraps of paper, which is my usual way of writing, will ever be read by anyone else!  I never set out to “write” a memoir — the book called “A Widow’s Story” is comprised of journal entries from Feb. 11, 2008, through Aug. 29, 2008. When Ray was first hospitalized, I was very anxious and excited and could not sleep well, so I wrote in the journal late at night, as I’ve been doing, though not so intensely, since the early 1970s. After Ray’s death, this was the only kind of writing that I could do, in fragments of a page or less. The act of writing — of even trying to write — of imagining to write — seemed meaningless, vain and silly.  In the summer of 2009, when I could not write fiction very readily, and was haunted by memories of a very visual nature, I gave in, in a sense, and turned to the journal entries — which I had not wanted to reread, as I certainly did not want to write a memoir — to shape into a coherent structure: what is called, so very abstractly, a “book.” In a traditional memoir, chapters are written; in this sort of composed memoir, chapters are assembled out of small journal entries, developed or expanded a bit, or edited.  The diarist doesn’t know how a scene will end, when it begins; she doesn’t know what the next hour will bring, let alone the next day or the next week; she is wholly unprepared for the most profound experience of her life — that her husband will die.  O’Rourke: It’s interesting that both of our books took shape almost unintentionally, as an organic response to loss — almost as a ritual we had to follow. It may sound strange, but one of the hardest things about a death is recognizing that the person is actually dead. I wasn’t raised as a Catholic, as my parents were, so I had no ceremonies to help me slog through the hazy first months of adjusting to a world without my mother in it.  That work had to happen mostly in my head. Maybe this is one reason you and I wrote about loss in real time, so to speak: writing helped us puzzle through this bewildering change in an age that’s largely let go of the ceremonies that helped bridge the stark boundary between inner sorrow and outer functioning.  Memoir is usually seen as an internal psychological exploration. But I felt that I wasn’t just writing about the personal loss of my mother; I was also mapping the intimate contours of this mysterious transformation we all experience, because that’s what I’d wanted when my mother died: a more resonant description than “the stages of grief” could offer.  Oates: Yes, I’m sure that you are right, Meghan — the act of writing is an act of attempted comprehension, and, in a childlike way, control; we are so baffled and exhausted by what has happened, we want to imagine that giving words to the unspeakable will make it somehow our own.  Most of “A Widow’s Story,” however, is determined by what was actually happening rather than by a somber reflection upon its meaning. Later, I thought of composing “A Widow’s Handbook” — to offer advice to others who, like me, had been totally unprepared and naïve. But all that remains of this is a final, brief chapter of a single sentence — the essence of widowhood is to find a way, however desperate, to keep yourself alive.
Two authors discuss their personal losses â a husband, a mother â and the often potent mix of memoir and mourning.