Why "death" isn't the best of interview starters.

Mild content warnings: death of a parent, cancer

It’s absolutely true that first and foremost, at a rudimentary level I set out to write an epic fantasy story that combined a bunch of things I love: dense worldbuilding, gothic themes, big philosophical ideas, and so on. There’s a couple more pieces to this puzzle, however.

Piece #1 – Putting all your eggs in one basket, then discovering the basket is developing a hole

To start, I’ve mentioned this isn’t the first novel I’ve written – it’s the first I’ve brought to publication. I had a sci-fi project with fantasy elements that I worked on with great love near-constantly from 2004 to around 2015, polishing and rewriting and polishing and rewriting in the hopes that perfectionism would pay off (spoiler alert: it does not). In some particularly dark years, working on it quite literally kept me alive. It felt like all I had. Although there were more lulls toward the end as full-time work and other projects crept in, I also began querying it (to no success). Self-doubt began to creep in. Given that a huge portion of my identity since childhood had been built around writing and becoming a published author, it felt like my very psyche was being eroded. I stopped finishing things, and wrote less and less.

Piece #2 – The kindness of a funeral director

The other piece of the puzzle – whose full impact I didn’t realize until much later – was the death of my mother from cancer in early 2008, when I’d just turned twenty. That this happened in the middle of my Bachelor's was world-shaking enough: having no siblings or other family, it meant I had to put aside grieving to take care of the endless practicalities of death by myself, then go back to university like nothing had happened. However, it also meant that when I finished my degree, due to a confluence of factors I was forced to move back to the States, an ultimately traumatic event that I still feel the repercussions from today. 

I say all of the above not to engender pity, but to provide context. My mother's death was of course tragic (she was too young, for one), but its ripple effect – both emotional and practical – was complex, and it wasn't surprising that death, grief, and family (in all its nuances) became themes running through my work from then on. 

More than that, however, was that in this emotional and practical chaos were a few pockets of brightness and compassion. One of those was my experience with the funeral director who took care of my mother; we'll call him "FD". In short, not only was FD a very good funeral director, but under my circumstances he and his assistant were, I felt, particularly kind to me as an essentially orphaned twenty year-old with no money or resources, and often did things that I suspect were outside the scope of their usual job. For example, I couldn't drive back then, so when it came time to lay my mother's ashes to rest with her father and his family way in the north over six hours away, I rode with him there and back. (Was it awkward? Yes and no. At the time, it was one of the few occasions I'd feel some measure of peace in the months to come.)

The book, Tamara – you were talking about inspiration for the book!

All of the above meant three things:

1. I wanted to get my mojo back and, most of all, prove to myself that I could finish something – and finish it (relatively) quickly, with less emotional attachment and far less perfectionism;
2. Death and grief were inevitably going to be a strong vein running through it; and
3. One of the characters would be some kind of funeral director, and another would be a younger girl.*

Maybe this is anticlimactic. Maybe it seems egregious to supply such a personal answer to a run-of-the-mill question. I'm sure it obvious why I can't exactly respond with all of that in a normal setting – it's too long, for one; too complex; it's maudlin – but I felt that I should be honest with what's important to me. While turning one's setbacks, traumas, or simply experiences into art is nothing new, I think it is becoming a bit of a commodity to be vulnerable. I want you to know me as well as my books, and so I want you to know more than the standard, "radio-edit" answer.

So what about you? Have you ever created something in a therapeutic capacity? Is there anything else you've read where the author has clearly drawn on their own traumatic experiences and if so, were you moved by it?