How to Write Memoir About Loss and Grief with Amy Biancolli

WRITER AND AUTHOR AMY BIANCOLLI is a staff reporter and writer for the online site, Mad In America. A journalist with decades of experience writing about the arts, culture, film, and many other topics for the Times Union of Albany, NY, she has also written for the Houston Chronicle and Hearst newspapers. She’s a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the author of three books. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write memoir about loss and grief. 

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Marion: Welcome, Amy.

Amy: Well thank you so much for having me, Marion, and I’m really happy to be here.

Marion: Well, it’s a joy for me. I admire your work so much and I think if we set this up a bit for people, they’ll understand where you’re coming from. Let’s just get up the experience thing here. The Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia, is a marvel of a place. You’re an arts writer, a movie critic, both in Texas and in upstate New York is lots and lots of experience. I want to talk a little bit about what writers bring when they come into this job because obviously you learn the basics in college and you learn the ethics of journalism, the structure of news stories and criticism at journalism school. What do you think you had on you when you entered this world of writing and giving a little thought to what you might advise people pack on them when they come into this world?

Amy: This is quite a backstory, so I’ll try to keep it concise because that’s always a goal in writing. Growing up, my dad was a classical music critic and author. He wrote for the New York World Telegram and Sun. I grew up with a love of the arts, love of music, and also surrounded by an appreciation for and reverence for journalism. Not only because of my dad, but just because of the household I grew up with. I also grew up in the era of Watergate, which this is strange, but I was about nine years old when the Watergate hearings commenced and I was addicted to them. That was my binge watching. I would get off the bus and run up the hill to my house. This was in Connecticut where we moved permanently when I was two. I would just watch. I was obsessed. The journalists covering that became my heroes and that sparked my interest. That and my dad’s nearly 40 years in arts journalism and music journalism really inspired my love of journalism, my reverence for it.

Ultimately I said, “Oh, I want to be a journalist when I grow up.” But at the same time I wanted to be a writer with a capital W. I don’t know that I could have told you what that meant, but I knew I had a drive to write. I know that’s not necessarily the same thing as the drive to report and craft stories, but I had these twin drives and even though I’m not sure I could articulate them exactly, they definitely had formed, made themselves manifest when I was in high school. It was definitely at the forefront of what I wanted to do and what I wound up doing and studying and participating in college as well, that’s where I started writing for the college weekly.

You do what people who want to be writers do you major in English and you read lots of books by Faulkner. I was like, “Wow, am I going to become that kind of a writer with a capital W?” I think everyone has a conception of what it means to be a writer. We have this kind of inflated world fame college courses named after you conception of what it means to be a writer. What I think is the most important takeaway, it’s really about figuring out what you want to say and how you want to say it and having some, not always enjoyment because writing isn’t always necessarily fun, but having some sense of, I don’t know if even satisfaction is the word, but some sense of closure or something that you glean from it that helps inform who you are and your own understanding of the world.

I don’t think I understood all that at that age. I certainly didn’t understand all that in college or even in grad school. Yeah, I think that’s it. I also had an English professor. I had two professors, one who was really inspiring and helpful in how I shaped my writing and another who basically asked me literally on a paper, “Why are you wasting my time?” Both were formative, both of them were formative and really informed me. Formative and informational. They really informed my path, my developmental path as a writer from that point on. What does it mean to waste a reader’s time, but what do I want to say and what’s the best way to say it? How do I follow and craft my own voice?

Marion: Yeah, what do you want to say and what’s the best way to say it is a wonderful way to phrase it. I get that. We talk a lot in memoir writing about what’s your argument? Even though many people come to the memoir field thinking they’re just going to write the history of themselves, of course they’re not if they want anyone else to read it. We do have to have a sense of what it is we want to say and what format we want to relate it. With that in mind, I’m very curious, I know with this beautiful background in music, it makes sense. One of the things you had on you all the time was this love of music.
I know that you still perform. You performed as a jazz fiddler with the group called Hot Tuesday. You grew up in music and criticism and it’s not surprising that your first book was a biography of violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler. It’s called Fritz Kreisler: Love’s Sorrow, Love’s Joy. I’d like you to talk a little bit about giving yourself some permission. That’s a holy, really as in capital H, holy field — music and criticism — because of what your dad did, because of your musical background. Is it permission we give our ourselves or was it literally following a command that you go and write something that was musical? What do you think now looking back?

Amy: It’s a good question. Well, what’s interesting is my mother was a concert violinist. That’s how my parents met. My late sister was a concert pianist, an aspiring one. As I said, and as you just reiterated, music was a huge part of my upbringing. The desire to write the book about Fritz Kreisler was one of absolute curiosity and love of his music. It also came from my experience as an amateur violinist. Back then, I was very happy, very flawed, still very flawed. Back then I was a flawed classical amateur. I mean, that’s the nature of it. You make mistakes. Not everybody is Joshua Bell or Fritz Kreisler standing up on a stage. My mother just adored Kreisler. She once followed him in New York City for 12 blocks trying to screw up the courage to talk to him. Yeah.

Talk about using your voice. Kreisler had a very distinct voice. It was very warm, it was very human. That’s why he was loved. He was also a virtuoso, but he had a voice and there’s no mistaking his voice from anybody else’s voice. My mother played a lot of his music and she also kind of channeled him in different ways. Then when I went back to the violin, as I had quit as a kid to play softball on soccer, it was my form of teenage rebellion. When I went back to it in my early twenties to take lessons, I started appreciating Kreisler more. When I moved to Albany, my first teacher here, she adored Kreisler and she was trying to show me something about his tone and his vibrato, and I thought I want to learn more about him. I started looking for a recent biography of him that, or fairly recent, that captured his whole life. He died in 62 and the only one was published about 12 years earlier.

I thought, “Huh, there’s no complete biography of Fritz Kreisler. Well, I guess I better write one.” If you had asked me, “Amy, what kind of books do you want to write.” Back when I was thinking about becoming a writer with a capital W thumping on my chest, I don’t think I would’ve said, “I want to write a musical biography.” But I just was curious. I wanted to learn more about him. That started a year’s long quest. The more I learned about him, the more I loved him. That’s how that happened.

Marion: Yeah. That’s beautiful because it’s got both the intimacy of the story of your mother following him for 12 blocks. In the short version, you caught up with him, you did kind of tap him on the shoulder. It’s like, mom, I got it from here. I’ll ask him. I mean, not that you literally did, because he had died before you wrote the book. It also talks about closing that gap between detachment and intimacy because. In that case, it was your mother to this it was almost going from in a very intimate experience of provocation to the detachment that’s really required to write biography. You flip that on its head when you go to write your next book in which you take on family and the House of Holy Fools, A Family Portrait In Six Cracked Parts, just a great title.

You tell the story from the perspective of the youngest child in a family that you lose your family over a period of two years time. You describe it as written with humor and hope, a memoir of music, madness, miracles, faith, and the insistent tug of life in the face of grief and death. I would agree, and I’m so glad you put humor first because there is so much humor in it. That is a tricky place to go, going into one’s own family. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the territory of going in there. You’ve now jumped into the intimate, that’s for sure. How do you decide whose story it is? What’s mine? What’s yours? What’s out of bounds when you jump into a story of family? Perhaps you can give us some details of that family that you’re willing to share here.

Amy: Yeah, yeah. Well that’s interesting because I wrote that. There’s always a different, not just motivation is too bland a word. There’s a different backstory, a different reason, a different urgent imperative for writing every book.

Marion: Provocation. Absolutely.

Amy: Yeah, provocation. Yeah. This was a combination of losing my parents and sister in a two year span. That was ’92 to ’94, and I had just gotten married in ’91. Then several months later, the following Spring, my sister Lucy died by suicide. Then a few months later, my dad died. He had a heart attack and fell, or the other way around and it took him a while, but he lingered in the hospital for several weeks, but he died. Then my mother died two years later after a fall in front of my house. In the midst of that in ’93, so my mom died in ’94. In ’93, my beautiful first baby daughter was born: Madeline. It was such a profound period in my life. Here I was creating a new family, bringing new life and honestly losing my childhood family was one of the spurs that led me and Chris, my late husband, to say, “Oh, okay, yeah.”

Not that I was replacing them, but I wanted to bring new life in. I was like, because we were going to postpone having kids just a little longer. I was no more postponing. I had this baby and then mama died and I literally, while I was nursing her, or she was sleeping between my mother’s legs in the hospital bed as we waited for her to pass from a subdural hematoma. I thought, “Well, this is where the spirituality enters the picture.” In the middle of this, after being told that my mother just had a few hours to live, I brought Madeline my baby down into the chapel at Albany Med and I was sitting there crying and this incredibly perceptive and kind gentle chaplain, I don’t remember his name, but whoever he was, he was a gift. He turned to me and he said, asked me if I wanted to talk. I told him. I said, “My daughter is never going to know my childhood family.”

Even telling the story now, it’s hard. I fight back tears because this was a profound revelation. Oh my god. I’m the bearer of all these stories from my childhood. I just felt like this beautiful baby is never going to know my parents and sister. He said to me, “Yes, they will. Through you.” I just sat there and of course it sounded like at the time I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I didn’t say that to him. I thanked him. That stuck with me. I’m like, through me, through me. It has been my quest, not just in writing that book, but in all the stories I’ve told my kids, my now three grown kids over the years to bring my family to life for them. That book was as a friend of mine, she named it for me. She said, “Amy, that was grief work.” I wrote it. It was a compulsion. I wanted to bring my family to life for at that point it was just Madeline, but I wanted to bring them to life for my kids.

Marion: And there’s the provocation. How about the territory? How about the privacy? How about the decisions?

Amy: Oh right, I didn’t get to that.

Marion: Yes, no, no. You got the provocation, which is so important. That’s so wonderful because I think so many people have had something said to them like that, but they think, yeah, well that’s not how real writers provoke their work. Yeah, it is. It is absolutely.

Amy: Yeah. I took a long winded way, sort of a side route to come at your question, which is to say because I had lost them and I felt this imperative to write their stories, I did not feel like I was betraying any confidences. I felt strongly, maybe this is as a person of faith, but even I think even if I weren’t a person of faith, I would’ve felt like they would still be rooting for me to tell this story in a way that felt as authentically as possible.

Marion: Oh. I love that.

Amy: The thing about my parents, my dad had, he had no short term memory because he had made an attempt when I was 11, a suicide attempt and was in a coma for nine days. His dementia was never named as anything in particular, but I’m pretty certain that there must have been some brain damage. He had no short term memory. My mother was always completely candid about all of it. When he was in a coma, she brought me and Lucy in to see him because she thought if he dies, I don’t want them to think their dad just disappears. That was hard. That was one of the hardest moments of my childhood, seeing my dad all puffed up and plugged up with all sorts of tubes.

That gave me the sense that, okay, this is true, this is authentic, this is real. My mother was real about it. I never had the sense that they would not want me to tell those stories. I did run the book past my half sister who she was the only daughter of my dad and his first wife who died. I say, “He’s your dad too so I want you to read it.” Aside from that, yeah, I didn’t really think would they be okay with me telling all these stories because I just, not just assumed, I knew they would be.

Marion: It’s a beautiful answer and one that I think a lot of people can search their souls and find how they feel and how they think they’re the people from whom they came might feel. You talk about authentic, your mother giving you this sense of authenticity. We have three suicides here, a suicide attempt by your father, a suicide by your sister, and then a suicide by your husband, which is chronicled in the 2014 book you published called Figuring Shit Out: Love, Laughter, Suicide, and Survival. I would argue that none of this work is about suicide and it’s very much an adventure tale, watching you go kind of hand over, hand up the mountain in the end of that book, Figuring Shit Out, you advise the reader to turn your face to the sun and you give us this remarkable, simple, it is advice.

It’s not stated as advice. It’s not in any way, “Now reader, you must turn your face to the sun.” But that’s what you show us that you do having created for us an enormous sense of reliability because you’re so honest. I just wanted to make that point that the authenticity that your mother seems to have instilled in you allows us to read you and come to the end of a book that shows you living through this experience and to deciding to turn your face to the sun. It’s a fairly remarkable journey, but it’s one that you do in present tense. I want to talk about that because you deliver that book right from the opening. There are two cops at the door, it just jumps right in, but it’s all in present tense. Why did you do it that way?

Amy: Okay, the present tense backstory, it wasn’t a conscious decision. That book was another book that it was a compulsion. It was written on provocation. After Chris died, people would say, “Oh, are you going to write about this? Are you journaling?” I’m like, “No, no. Living through it is hard enough.” He died in September of 2011. Easter, the following year, my oldest, Madeline, who was the baby in the hospital long ago she was on a gap year in Ecuador. I decided, “Well, I’m going to bring my other two kids, Jeanie and Mitchell down to visit Madeline in Ecuador.” We had just one adventure after another, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It was just incredibly vivid. I took notes, not because I wanted to write about it, but because I didn’t want to forget it. It was filled with these epiphanies, realizing that we’re going to make it through one way or the other.

We’re still a family, we’re altered. Chris isn’t here, but we’re still a family. I went back home and my friend Bob Whitaker, who runs Mad In America and is an old friend from his years at the Times Union in Albany and he was a dear friend of Chris’s. He and I had been emailing, and so I told him about, I promised to tell him stories about Ecuador, but he was in the middle of a book tour and he said, “Could you email me some stories? I’d love to hear them.” I just plunged in and wrote one after another of these four emails describing everything that happened. They were just, I happened to write him with them with a lot of shouty, all caps. I happened to write them in the present tense because they felt so present to me and I was going to fire them off to, well, the first one I was going to fire off to Bob.

I thought, “Why should Bob be the only one to read this?” I copied friends and family and they were like, “Oh, tell us more.” I wound up sending four long emails that I had no thought of expanding on them. Between those and another experience I had of walking to the garage rooftop where Chris actually jumped. I just went up there because I wanted, this is strange, but I wanted to see. I don’t know why I wanted to be there, but I did. I went back home and just for myself, I wrote an essay about that. Just for myself. Again, present tense. I’m like, “Wow.” Because when you’re grieving, it all feels present tense. Your dear ones, they’re still with you, you’re still processing their absence. Their absence is, it’s just there. It’s in the present tense.

It’s not something that happened. Then it’s over. Then I had a really comical experience picking up a hitchhiker, this really friendly, quirky, older guy was thumbing a ride. He wound up flirting with me and I had to explain to him that my husband had died. It was the strangest thing. I go back and Bob had happened to call. I told him the story and I jokingly said, “Ugh, I ought to write a book about this. I ought to call it adventures in widowhood.” I was joking. Bob said, “No, no, no, you have to write, you have to.” He wouldn’t leave me alone. He’s like, “You got to write it.” I’m like, “No, I’m too tired.” He’s like, “You got to write it.” I finally thought, “Okay.” Then I realized, “Well, I’ve already written four chapters.” No five, because I’d written four about Ecuador and one about going up to the rooftop.

They were in the present tense for whatever compulsion I was obeying. I just kept writing it that way. It was very, again, very shouty, lots of all caps, lots of swearing from the beginning and very short feel comfortable, short punchy essays. I was in the middle of living through that first year, and it was present. It was a present tense year.

Marion: The present tense allows us to feel that the grief is sitting on you with you cloaking you. It’s all around you all the time. It also creates this idea that you’re present every moment of it. It results in this great reliability on your part. We just say, “Oh, I’ll go anywhere with her.” And so we’ll go to the rooftop with you. We’ll go to the part where you go and get the cheap urn instead of paying for the double urn. The poor guy at the funeral home, who’s got to concede that yeah, you can rent a casket, you don’t have to buy one. It’s wonderful, but we feel like we’re sitting on your shoulder with you, which I think is really effective. We feel the same way when you decided to tell a moth story in 2014. And this always is so important for writers to understand that you can have one huge life experience and you can just keep writing from it as long as each piece isn’t about the same thing.

Your piece, your moth story, which is not about suicide, and it’s not about turning your face to the sun and it’s got these fantastic details. The doorbell rings, you’re up in the attic, you come down, you see the two police people sitting there, standing there, you know what’s happening and you end up watching “Battlestar Galactica” with your kids. The question becomes from the crematorium, do you want your husband’s wedding ring burned with him? This provocation, that question provokes this ability, as you say, to begin this grieving process differently about honest grief, about moving into this other place.

It’s fascinating to me to watch you tell this story that lives or honest pain, that’s the phrase you used, right? You move into honest pain, you say. So talk to us just a little bit about how to take one experience of life, and now we’re talking about the hugest, the suicide of a husband, especially after a family history of suicide and concentrate on that. They ask you this question, you do these specific things with the rings, and you allow yourself into what you refer to moving into honest pain. How did you take it there for that assignment of a Moth Story?

Amy: Well, that was interesting because that was such an incredible privilege working on that story with the Moth folks who are amazing and helped me shape it in a way that the producer I worked with was just marvelous and had me really zero in on moments that would connect in a very specific and visceral way. She also urged me not to write it out because she said a lot of times writers, they want to write it out and memorize it, and that’s not what you do. That’s not the best way to do it. It was really a challenge in a lot of ways to boil it down. The thing about talking about grief is it’s not usually addressed in the way it actually plays out. We have these different narratives of grief. We have different cultural understandings of grief.

We have different expectations of grief. We have things that we say that we’re meant to say and things that we do that we’re meant to do. Then we have the things that nobody ever talks about. After Chris died, I just had this head to toe body ache. It was strange, like the touch deprivation. I had never read about this. I had to google crazy to find some widowhood support groups that talked about it. I figured in telling any intensely personal story, especially one that’s really dark and on a subject that a lot of people not only don’t talk about, but really don’t want to hear. One reason we don’t talk a lot, not candidly, about suicide and grief is cause people don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to be reminded that that stuff happens. That’s human not to want to hear it.

But I figured, well, I’m writing this or I’m telling this story, this horrible thing happened. If any good is to come out of this horrible thing, I have to be honest because I have to make someone else feel less alone. You don’t know that’s going to happen, but if it does happen, that’s a gift. That’s not saying that the horrible thing that happened is ever going to be anything other than horrible. It means that something good and even beautiful can come out of it. That requires honesty and openness because unless we’re being honest and open, we can’t know.

Marion: It’s the reason we do what we do. We’re sharing humanity.

Amy: Yeah.

Marion: Absolutely. When we write memoir, when we do good journalism, when we ask provoking questions of authorities on the topics, especially the topics that you write about for Mad In America, whether it be the stress on college counselors or how music can help us heal, and these are long form pieces of journalism that I’ll put links in the transcript to on this wonderful site, but we’re sharing our humanity and as we start to wrap this up. That’s kind of where I want to go. It’s just to get your sense of what we’re doing when we annotate what we have on us, because our writing allows us to pull from us. As you just said, if somebody else, Emily Dickinson says it best, “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not lived in vain.”

Those kinds of sentiments and not just mere sentimentality, which is the great difference in your work, it’s sentiment that we get not just mere sentimentality in your writing, they allow other people to feel, learn, move through, maybe learn to turn their faces to the sun. But it’s one thing we say all the time as writers, oh, I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel about anything until I write it down. And that’s true. But what are we really saying? What happened to you, do you think, when you assigned yourself to sit down in the hard chair and take this stuff on? Did you understand it better?

Amy: Yeah, this is what I say, not just to other people, but to, I’ve said it to myself over the years that every time I sit down and grapple with something and shape it into a narrative, it helps me process it. It helps me understand it. I think why it’s definitely a form of grief work. It doesn’t make everything better, all shiny and new, happy peppy people, happy shiny people. I shouldn’t be misquoting REM, I love REM. Yeah, it was definitely a form of understanding what happened to me. Sometimes when I’m writing something personal, I won’t really see it clearly until I’ve written it down and I’ll go, “Oh, okay, okay.” That’s what that meant. It’s very strange, but sometimes I think we’re all kind of works of literature in a way where we’re craft.

We craft these lives and we don’t necessarily have control over them, but we can still see meaning in them. The way we find meaning in literature, we find meaning in movies or find meaning in music. I mean, it’s all part of it. I think we’re designed to really want to understand and make a story out of it. I think that’s, since the dawn of language and music, we’ve just wanted to connect with people and share our stories, share our song.

Marion: And with that in mind, I always say to people when they come to my memoir classes and counsel and coaching and all of those things, they say, I’ve got a story about suicide. I’ve got a story about the death of a child. I’ve got the story of, no one’s going to want to read, no one’s going to buy it. I hear in publishing, you can’t sell books on death. I always say, “Write it anyway.”

Amy: Yeah.

Marion: Write it anyway. What would you say?

Amy: Yeah, I’d say write it anyway. Look, in writing as in music you can make literally hundreds of dollars.

Marion: Wow. Really?

Amy: Yeah. It’s not like any of anything I’ve written has sold many books, but it was still gifts to me to write them. I’m still going to keep writing and I’m still writing now. I’m writing things that may never get published or be on a stage or what have you, but I’m still going to write them.

Marion: Thank goodness.

Amy: I don’t have much of a choice. I’m at the stage in life, I’m like, “Oh, I’m just going to enjoy this. I’m going to do what I can and tell what stories I can.” The rest of it I have very little control over. Publishing has always been conservative. Yes, I was told repeatedly, oh, that’s too depressing. I got lots of wonderful rejections, letters on both books saying, “Oh, this is so beautiful. Oh, but Amy is not a name and it’s too depressing,” but that’s okay. I wrote them, they’re out there and they’ve brought me nothing. I don’t know, is peace too big a word? Hope? I’ll go with those.

Marion: Peace is a really good goal.

Amy: Peace is a good goal. Yeah, some peace. Not all peace, but some peace.

Marion: No, some peace. Well, I’m so grateful for you to come and talk about this. This is just the “Write It Anyway” school. I think the two of us could run a “Write It Anyway” school, because you just don’t know. You’re such a beautiful example of just going into it and seeing what you’re going to find. I will put all kinds of links to your current writing in Mad In America. Thank you, Amy. Thank you so much for coming along for the candor, for the work. Yes, please do keep writing. It’s a grace.

Amy: Thank you, Marion on all counts. This has been wonderful.

Marion: You’re so welcome. The writer is Amy Biancolli. Her books can be found wherever books are sold. See more on her at Mad In America, which is located online at mad in america dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Qwerty is produced by Overrit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overrit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com where I offer online classes in how to write memoir. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. If you like what you’re here, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.