How to Write About Grief, With Jill Smolowe

Jill Smolowe knows how to write about many things. She spent 30 years as a foreign affairs writer for Time and Newsweek and a senior writer for People. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post Magazine and The New York Times, to name only a few, but it’s her most recent book that attracted my attention. Why? Because Jill Smolowe knows how to write about grief, and in Four Funerals and a Wedding, while she informs and illuminates us on grief, she also provides a lesson in how to write about grief by teaching us about resilience. In other words, her book is not actually about grief. It’s about what she did with grief, and in that she provides a great lesson in memoir writing. Listen in — and read along — to this episode of QWERTY and find out how to write about grief by taking your writing that essential step further.

Read along as you listen to this episode of QWERTY, my podcast with co-host David Leite. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher. (The following transcript has been edited from the original recording).

Marion Roach Smith: So, David, I’d like to introduce you to writer Jill Smolowe. Jill and I began the same summer as copy boys, as we were known, at The New York Times, and have kept in touch ever since. Yeah.
David Leite: Way back in the day.
Marion: In the day, David That’s the way I’m going to date this. In the day. She’s an award-winning journalist. She spent 30 years as a foreign affairs writer for Time and Newsweek and a senior writer for People. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, The New York Times, Boston Globe, More, Money, Red, Bark, Adoptive Families, and The Readers Digest Today’s Best Nonfiction series. Her essays have appeared in fortune.com, time.com, shewrites.com, everydayhealth.com, and regularly on the PBS site nextavenue.org.
David: I love underachievers. I really do.
Marion: I know. I know. Well, we got to ask her the same question we asked somebody else is, “Yeah, well so what. Can you bake a cherry pie?”
David: Exactly.
Marion: But she’s the author of the memoirs Four Funerals and a Wedding: Resilience in a Time of Grief. And, An Empty Lap: One Couple’s Journey to Parenthood. She’s also the co-editor of the anthology A Love Like No Other: Stories from Adoptive Parents. So Jill, please meet David.
David: Hey. Hi.
Jill: Hi David, nice to meet you.
David: Hi Jill. Nice to meet you too.
Jill: And Marion, nice to be with you as always.
Marion: Nice to be back together.
David: So talking about your very paltry resume.
Marion: He’s a little jealous, Jill.
David: It just makes me want to jump right in here. I just got to say, Jill, that your recent book was just dazzling. It really was. And we want to give listeners a tiny bit of background on that. In the course of, I think it was 17 months, you buried four relatives, correct?
Jill: That’s right.
David: Your husband of many years, your sister, your mother and your mother-in-law. But it’s what happens next after the death, that’s really your story. That you didn’t fall apart. You didn’t even try to fall apart. And while the reader might think you can teach us about how to write about grief, instead you wrote a book that’s not about grief, but it’s about grief and moving on. So how did this decision come to be?
Jill: You mean the decision to write this book?
David: Yeah.
Jill: Okay. I bizarrely had been working on a novel dealing with grief, before grief entered my life. And as a result, I had read up a lot of memoirs about grief, and thought I knew what was going to hit me. But in fact, what hit me was something completely different. And so I wanted to offer a different sort of counterintuitive approach to grief to people.
David: Mm-hmm.
Marion: Thank goodness. In an interview in Psychology Today, that I read with you, you point out that bereavement research of the last two decades, points out three groups. People who are overwhelmed by grief for more than 18 months. Those that return to normal life within 18 months. And those that return to normal functioning within six months, or even days. And they labeled this last group resilient. And it’s by far the largest group. And in Four Funerals and a Wedding, you report on this. So I find this just extraordinary. That A, you were able to do so. But what I’d really love to do is share with our listeners how you reported that aspect of the book. You say you’ve read some novels, but then you’ve got to go find out a lot about these people and their resiliency.
Jill: Well, the memoir is about my own resilience. I was relying on the research that bereavement researchers over the last 30 years have done. Particularly the work of clinical psychologist named George Bonanno, who had sort of compiled into a book for lay people, what the research shows. Because we had all grown up, those of us who are boomers, we grew up with that five stages of grief thing.
Marion: Yep.
Jill: And in fact, that idea of anger, and denial, and bargaining, and acceptance, and depression, it’s not true. Though, the people that had been studied by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross were the dying, not the bereaved.
Marion: Mm-hmm.
Jill: And so researchers in the last 30 years have really gone out into the field and very meticulously tracked different populations. They even identified populations before there was the event of bereavement. They would look for aging populations, and then track them to the point of where they would lose somebody and see what their reactions were. And how that did or didn’t help them to cope.
Marion: Hmm. Extraordinary.
David: It’s just fascinating to me, because a lot of people nowadays who write memoirs about grief, they do it after having experienced that grief. Because they want to know, and really they’re craving to know how they can write about grief. And clearly your book tells your truth, that you found a resilience that you didn’t know you had. Or you really weren’t sure that you had. So the question really is about timing. About when you understood. Now did you need to fully understand what you’d gone through? Which is what I had to do with my own memoir. Or were you making discoveries along the way as you were writing?
Jill: I knew what I wanted to say with this memoir. Because my own experience, what I came to understand, is that grief doesn’t… When you have a dire diagnosis, as I did in the case of my husband, who was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, that’s actually when the grief begins. Because you were facing the prospect of losing somebody. And I had two and a half years where I was grappling with that possibility, before I was then dealing with the reality. And in no way is the reality… It’s harder, obviously.
But what I’m saying is that I was processing it all along. And I was seeing what I needed in order to keep going. Because during that time, while my husband was in treatment, then my sister got diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. And my mother, her rheumatoid arthritis was getting worse and worse. So I was dealing with multiple extreme health situations. And I had to figure out how to cope. And those mechanisms, I then found were of use when I had to actually deal with my grief.
Marion: So how do you do that? How do you get up and live what I call, writing in real time? Live the experience, making notes with the experience. Talk to us a little bit about the simultaneous aspects of living with it, and writing about it. Is that good, bad, indifferent? Does it contribute? Are there some days… Did you ever go to bed with a wide-mouth jar of peanut butter and just go binge watch-
David: Or a bottle of Jack Daniels-
Marion: Or there’s that too.
David: Yeah.
Marion: Me, it’s been a peanut butter and binge watch Netflix and not write.
Jill: Oh, absolutely. I had to live with my grief. It’s not like my husband died, and then I went right to the computer. He actually died in 2009, and I wrote that book in less than a year, concluding in 2012. But during that period from 2009, 10, 11, here and there, I felt a need to sit down, and I started writing scenes. And the important thing, that could be useful to your listeners is, I was getting down what was sticking with me that that felt important. The points, the ideas that I knew I wanted to communicate. I didn’t at all have an idea of how am I going to weave these things together. I just knew the moments that stuck with me that had seemed very important. And that I wanted to share.
Marion: Mm-hmm.
David: I find this, I do, I find this so utterly fascinating. Because when I wrote my memoir, which I wrote 2014, 2015, I was going back 30, 40 years earlier. And I was still getting stuck in some of the mishegoss that was back there. Some of the incredible pain and fear and anxiety. And I know that at the end of a day’s writing, I was wrecked. I really couldn’t do anything.
And after I wrote the book, I went through about a six or eight months depression. Because I had to relive so much of what went on. And so I guess that’s the reason why we’re asking, how did you actually get this down when everything was swirling around you? Do you consider yourself one of those resilient people that you found out about in the research?
Jill: Oh, I absolutely do. And in fact, part of the intent of this book was to put a face on this notion of resilience. Because I kept hearing statements like, “Oh, you’re so amazing.” And what I was hearing was, “There’s something wrong with my grief.”
David: Yes.
Jill: And it wasn’t until I tapped into this research that I realized, no, no, no, there are 51% of the grief population, handle and experience grief much like I do. Which is to say we keep moving forward. We’re not crushed by it. That’s not to say we feel any less sad. But our way of dealing with it is something else. And the reason I wanted to put this out there, was one, to reassure people who like me, were still walking forward, that there’s nothing wrong with your grief.
Jill: But the other thing was to also let loved ones know how they can help. Because one of the things that happens when you lose someone. And especially if it’s a spouse or God forbid a child is, people come rushing at you with their expectations, and assumptions about what you feel and what you need. And the number one on there is, the only thing you can think about and talk about is you’re upset. And that’s not necessarily true, and it’s not necessarily helpful. So that was one of the reasons I very much wanted to write about this. And to share what was helpful to me.
David: And that’s why your book is so important. Because so many memoirs that are written about grief and loss are about that unending, just impossible, never finished sense of grief. That we’ve got to crawl out of this hole, and it takes so long, and it’s so difficult. And you present another way of looking at it. You present I think a counterpoint to so many of the books that are out there. I think it’s refreshing and I think it does really validate so many of us who grieve differently.
Jill: Thank you for that. I believe when you write a memoir that there are kind of two critical questions you need to know, before you tackle it. One is, why do you want to tell this story? Which is to say, what is your message? What is the hard-earned thing that you have learned? But the other thing is how are you going to tell it? Which is to say, what lens are you going to look through? And it was when I found my lens that I was able to write the book. And the lens was very specific. Which was not how my life fell apart, which is what the standard grief memoir is.
David: Exactly.
Jill: It was what kept me going, what helped in order to enable me to keep moving on.
Marion: That’s fabulous. Let’s talk about that for a second. I sometimes say to the people I work with, “Write through the lens of your pitch.” And not everybody understands that. Clearly you understand that. You write through the lens of what you know your book is going to deliver. What you would pitch this as if you had one sentence to that greatest editor whoever lived, or that agent you need to have. So writing through the lens of the pitch doesn’t mean that everything you hear, say, or experience fits the pitch. It’s just that’s where you identified yourself. So you pick up the notebook. From the first day you pick up, let’s say you used, I always still use a notebook. Do you still use a notebook in your reporting? Or were you writing things on your phone, or how were you first gathering data?
Jill: I was mostly doing this at my computer. I can think faster with the keyboard.
Marion: Yeah. So you’re writing stuff down. You’re writing things down as they occur to you and you’re getting a lot of wordage. And that at some point you’re sculpting down those sheer number of words to fit your argument, to fit your pitch. Is that what you’re saying?
Jill: Yeah. I wasn’t thinking of it as a pitch. But rather that guiding idea of what helped me to keep going, enabled me to pick and choose my anecdotes. A lot happened in those years, a lot.
Marion: Yeah.
Jill: And selecting, there were some wonderfully poignant moments that I certainly had written, but I could see it didn’t serve the purpose of the message I was trying to share. And it didn’t fit the lens of how I was going at this story. The way I actually finally figured out how to tell this story was by being infuriated by another writers memoir. Where she wrote about losing a husband, and never bothered to mention in the course of it that within that year she remarried. And I was like, “Come on. It’s not just about falling apart, it’s about how do you keep going.” And that’s a huge, huge piece. And that’s when I realized that’s what I want to talk about. [crosstalk 00:00:14:14]. And they’re not all big moments like that. But, there were little things that people did for me along the way, that were just perfect. And that’s part of what I wanted to give a sense of.
David: Yeah. That was your focus. And Marion that’s very close to what you talk about when you talk about your argument.
Marion: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you curate the scenes from your experience that best illustrate what it is you now know. And that is that this is the face of 51% of grief. I think that’s incredibly generous. I also think it’s remarkable that you can curate that way to make the points that you do. It’s so helpful. Earlier you said there would be people who would be asking you questions and by their very questions, you know that they thought that there was something wrong with the way you were grieving. And I think that’s true for so many people, especially those people who get on with it. That there is a critical, literally as in criticism aspect. Huh. Remarkable.
Marion: So let’s talk a little bit about the publishing process here. You published this book, Four Funerals and a Wedding, with She Writes Press, which is known as a hybrid press. And you’ve previously published with Simon & Schuster, with your first book An Empty Lap, that chronicles your adoption process with your child. So you know the trade well. You’ve been through the publishing process. And in a few weeks we’re going to be interviewing Brooke Warner of She Writes Press.
Jill: Oh, wonderful.
Marion: Yeah, she’s great. And I’m fascinated by her. And she has a new book out. But let’s just get your take on how you made the decision to publish with a hybrid press, if you would please?
David: Well, the decision was more made for me when With the two books that I did previously, one with Riverhead, one was Simon & Schuster as you mentioned. I had put out a proposal, I had gotten a contract upfront. It was all very clean and nice. This book, I didn’t want to lock myself into having to finish it. David mentioned earlier how difficult and emotionally painful it was when he wrote his memoir. I didn’t know entering into this if it would be too painful. And if it was, God knows I was in enough pain. I didn’t need more. So I didn’t look for a contract upfront.
David: And it turns out it was a good thing. I didn’t. Because when I sent it to my agent, she called me up as soon as she read it, and she said the usual. “I love it, I love it.” She said, “But I’ve got to warn you. Grief doesn’t sell.” I said, what do you mean grief doesn’t sell. And it turns out publishing-
Marion: Sorry, but let’s just all take a moment and put our heads down at our desks, and roll our heads back and forth and moan.
David: … brought down from on high.
Jill: Well, it turned out that she was right.
Marion: Yeah.
Jill: And she sent it out and sent it out and it kept… the usual boiler plate, “It’s beautiful, it’s wonderful, but we can’t put it on our list.” So I was told about She Writes Press, which was just getting started, and connected up with Brooke. And I was in the second season of authors, and guess what, grief sells.
Marion: Yeah.
Jill: I have sold more than 10,000 copies, which I understand is sort of the threshold for, “yes, you’re good for the next book”, kind of thing.
Marion: Mm-hmm.
Jill: It does sell.
Marion: Mm-hmm.
Jill: Anyway, She Writes was a very interesting experience. And I think the main takeaway that I got from it, is that while you don’t have the financial resources of a publishing house behind you, what you do have is a lot better control over your book.
David: Yeah. So for our listeners, a hybrid press is, for lack of a better definition, it’s somewhere between mass-market publishing and self-publishing. But the critical difference is that in hybrid publishing, they have a fabulous distributor. In fact She Writes Press was founded using the same distributor, meaning the way they get the books in the stores, that Penguin uses. And they get you your ISBN number. And everything is the same. It’s a real published book. And you got really good mass-market reviews. You got on shows, you’ve got reviewed. It wasn’t like self-publishing where, “Uh-uh, we don’t review self-published books.” I saw your reviews and so that’s a huge difference I think.
Jill:  Right. Well also, She Writes is curated. They take only a small number of books each season. They’ve gotten stronger and stronger in getting out there. Now they’re in the time I did it, it was hard to get your book in front of traditional publications for review consideration. Now She Writes has that standing and so they also get Kirkus, and Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. And even being second season, Barnes and Noble bought-
Marion: Yup.
Jill: … bought my books. And I had a wide distribution in in bookstores. So, and I know they’ve only gotten stronger since then. The book came out in 2014. And they’re five years later. And I’ve heard they’re really doing well.
Marion: Yes. Good. I’m so glad. And it’s beautiful. The book is physically-
David: It is.
Marion: ... gorgeous.
Jill: Thank you for that. And also one of the things that in terms of control, I got to have a big hand in the development of the cover. I wrote all of the jacket copy, promotion copy, all of that stuff, that just kind of goes out of your hands in a traditional house, I was very much involved with. And I liked that.
Marion: Good.
David: And you were happy with the publicity they did?
Jill: Well that’s where I’m saying that you don’t have the resources. I actually hired my own publicists. They had very limited. Brooke, they put the season’s worth of books out there. But to promote your own book, it’s your own job. But these days I’ve got a lot of friends-
David: That’s what it is in traditional publishing.
Jill: Right, exactly.
David: Exactly.
Marion: I have always promoted all my own books and so-
David: Me too.
Marion: And I’ve been published by the four biggest publishers in the world. And I’ve always set aside three months to do nothing but publicize them. So I just don’t see that as being a downside of hybrid publishing at all. That you’ve got to…
David: No, not at all. It shouldn’t be a hard no for anyone because of that.
Marion: No.
David: Now, talking about more traditional publishing. Now, you’ve been in The New York Times and Newsweek. You’ve written tons of essays both online and also you’ve written the three books. And now of course there had to be tons and tons of pitches for these particular essays. And I want to talk about this. Specifically about your extensive essay collection. Are you hoping when you write essays to test out material in an essay before it maybe pitching a book to someone?
Jill: Oh boy, I wish I had that much force. Actually, it’s on the back end. I wrote all these essays to promote my book.
David: Got it.
Jill: I placed the articles, I sliced off pieces of my book and developed those points into essay-length articles, in order to put my title in front of people. My publicist came up with the idea. “You should put it in Bark. People lose their pets.” And I’m like, “What?” But by God, I wrote one about… I found an essay to write and it went into Bark, and maybe it did sell some books. I don’t know.
Marion: Oh, I love that. I love that. “You should put this in Bark. People lose their pets.” Yeah.
Jill: Yeah.
Marion: They do.
David: They do. They do.
Marion: And quite honestly, I care more about my dogs than some of my friends. But I guess I shouldn’t say that on there live.
Jill: Right?
David: So following up on that, Jill, what advice can you give our listeners about the kind of perseverance that you’ve shown in your career to date? What does every writer need to have to make it? And by making it, I mean, just getting books published?
Jill: You really have to have tenacity.
David: Mm-hmm.
Jill: You have to have determination, you have to be willing to court the rejection.
Marion: Mm-hmm.
Jill: You’re not always going to get a yes, I’m writing something right now that I am not at all confident I’m going to get a yes on. But you have to persevere. That’s the only way I can put it.
Marion: Yep.
David: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Marion: Yep. And you show remarkable agility because you write for a lot of different platforms.
David: Yes.
Marion: And I find that many writers that I speak to, especially many younger writers, tell me that they’ve already self-selected. They are an essayist, they’re a book-length writer. And I say, “Ooh, you will need to be getting over that.” Because just as you just said, you write a book, you want to slice off a piece, and put it out there in the mass-market as the teaser for the reader, to go buy the book. Or you want to do it the other way around, as David suggested. Test your material on the public with an essay, and see if you get an agent, or an editor, or whatever.
So the ability to write on so many different platforms, did you study the platforms? Did you study the online world, or study the essays? Give people, our audience is mostly writers audience, but they’d love a little, I think, advice, on how to just utilize that kind of agility and jump from platform to platform.
Jill: Well, with the essays, I had been trying my hand at them over the years with not much success. But once I had a very clear-cut topic and was promoting the book, I don’t know why. I found people were very receptive to it. This topic, “grief doesn’t sell. You know what, it sells in essay, big time.
And I just kept searching for different aspects of it that might appeal to a particular audience. So at Bark, I talked about how walking my dog actually helped me through a lot of the difficulty and pain I was going through when my husband was sick. And see that was one thing. But for The New York Times, I came up with, “I am a bigamist”, because I’m now remarried. And how being twice married doesn’t mean the other husband just goes away.
Jill: I keep looking for different ways of exploring different aspects of grief. And the more you do it, the better you get at it.
Marion: Yeah. I’m just going to say, I remember the bigamist line. And I literally remember spitting my tea onto the computer screen, when I saw you refer to yourself as a bigamist. And I thought, “There’s not a reader in the world who’s not going to read on after that line.”
Right. Well, my triumph there is I put it on as the lede and The New York Times bought it.
David: But I this points up a very important thing that we have to say. Another quality to add to that list of perseverance, and continuing to do what you do, is creativity. And not the idea of creativity in your writing. But the creativity that goes along with how to market yourself, how to market your book. That was very clever that you talked about, the idea of that you’re a bigamist. Because your previous husband never goes away. He’s always going to be in your heart. And you’re loving two men. And I think that’s very important and very clever. People somehow sometimes just get so tight in their idea of what they can and can not do. They don’t think outside of the box. They don’t color outside of the lines. And it seems as if you really relish coloring outside of the lines.
Marion: I do think you’re a color outside of the lines writer. Yes.
Jill: Well, thank you for that. But admittedly, grief is a very rich subject. It’s easier to, I think, to promote a book when you have a nonfiction subject, which is what memoir is. When I was going through, She Writes, there were several of the people who were doing it at the same time, were promoting novels. How do you do that? I think that’s a harder ask. But with a nonfiction book, you have a subject. So you know who your potential audience is.
Marion: Yes. So a lot of my friends refuse to even make websites, a lot of my writer friends. They just refuse to-
David: Yes.
Marion: … get online. And lots and lots of young writers are online, but they’re only online. So you and I come from a different generation where we know… we started at the New York Times when they were still using ink for God’s sake. So we’ve transported ourselves over several generations of writing. But I love the fact that you have your pieces, your essays, and you have a wonderful, wonderful bank of essays, online, available with the links. And making them accessible this way to the reading public. And I want to just ask you why. Give some encouragement to the people who need to get their stuff up and visible to others.
Jill: I love that these ideas are not only out there, but stay there. Because these links, three years from now, somebody loses a husband. And somebody says, “Oh, I remember I read this article”, and tracks it down and finds the link and sends it. That I can be of help of service to somebody three years after I wrote the article. I love that it lives forever online.
Marion: Right.
Jill: I love that it keeps getting passed forward. And I’m not sure why a writer would resist that. It’s kind of free publicity in a way.
Marion: Right.
David: But the interesting thing, I’ve been online for 22 years. And what I find is some of the writers I know who do not want to get a website, feel that they’re giving it away for free. And therefore by doing that, no one’s going to want to buy their books. And I think it’s the absolute opposite. I think if someone enjoys your voice, connects with your voice, connects with what you have to say. I’ve done it with just novels and memoirs and books. I’ll get the audiobook, I’ll get the paperback, and I’ll buy the hardbacks. I just keep on buying it. I’m not sure where I even have them anymore. Because I just liked so much what the writer has to say.
David: So I agree with you. I do think it’s free publicity. And I think it’s a way of having 24/7 outreach to people, people in need. People want to read something interesting and you’re always there for them.
Jill: Right. Right.
Marion: And you mentioned being help to people. So as we wrap this up, let’s talk about this. You founded a life beyond that book. You took that book, and then you transposed it to, I want to say even a higher key. Even though there’s no higher key than writing, as far… But a new life for yourself. You repurposed yourself. So you remade yourself into something else. Can you talk a little bit about where that book led you and what you’re doing now?
Jill: Sure. Thank you for that. I retired from my journalism career. I retired from what was once Time Inc. and discovered in my retirement package, a retraining allowance. And so I took that retraining allowance, and I trained and certified as what’s called a life coach. And then I specialized what I was doing in the grief and loss area, primarily grief and divorce. So I also see these essays, therefore, as a way of drawing potential clients to me.
Marion: Mm-hmm.
Jill: So, I’m a grief coach. That’s the short answer.
Marion: Yeah. That’s wonderful. Well, thank you for that. And thank you for this. It’s just a joy to talk to you. I’m so proud to know you all these years, and watch what you’ve done. And we’re just so grateful that you came on. So thank you.
Jill: Well, thank you guys, both of you so much. And David, I don’t know you, but Marion, you’re my guru on memoir. I just think you’re the best teacher out there.
Marion: Oh, thank you.
David: She is. She was my teacher.
Jill: She makes it clearer than anybody. I just love the way she breaks it down.
Marion: Thank you.
Marion: Jill’s book is Four Funerals and a Wedding. You can find her at jillsmolowe dot com.
David: And don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to us wherever you go. Until next time, thank you for listening. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey, and this podcast was produced and recorded by Overit Studios. Reach them at overitstudios dot com.

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