Q&A with Leslie Pietrzyk, author of This Angel On My Chest
Why did you decide to write a book meditating on the death of a husband?
I wrote one story the summer after he died, but for years I didn’t address his death overtly in my work because the emotions were too close. In 2011, I was at an artists’ colony, chatting at breakfast about the literature of sub-cultures, and that afternoon I rather randomly decided to write my own story about a sub-culture, which ended up being the young widow support group I had attended. The words spilled out, and I was fortunate to be in a place where I could follow the muse, as they say, and in that week I drafted several stories that now appear in the book.
How long did it take you to write this book?
Once I decided to take on the project of linked stories, I spent two years writing and revising them, amidst my other responsibilities.
You lost your first husband at a young age. How has that loss affected your writing?
That loss affected my entire life in every way imaginable, with my life suddenly split into “before” and “after.” Not that plenty of people don’t also have life-changing events, but the loss of a spouse—whether through death or divorce—requires a certain rebuilding process that consumes time and energy. More specifically, I lost a true believer in my work, someone who had been there from the beginning, since we met in college. I’m sad that he never held one of my published books in his hand.
How did you find writing helped your mourning process?
Writing that first story, shortly after Robb died, was immensely cathartic and necessary. It literally dropped onto the page, with no anxious pauses for pondering what next, and I did little substantive revising. Years passed before I dared approach the topic again, which I believe makes for a better-crafted, more artful book: with the hard work of mourning behind me, I gained the distance and perspective needed to transform a highly personal experience into something more universal. At this later point, too, it was a pleasure to sort through my memories and decide which to include.
One can’t help but think there is some of you in these stories. How much of you is in there?
The assignment I gave myself as I started this project was to place at the heart of each a single, hard, true thing about my own experience as a young widow and to go from there. I take a lot of literary license, of course, but this is by far my most personal book. I wouldn’t expect readers to try guessing what’s true and what’s made-up; the book isn’t a puzzle to decipher. But I like to think that the parts of “real me” that are in there give the book a recognizable authenticity.
What advice would you offer to someone else who has lost a spouse?
This sounds like easy advice, but I found it hard to follow: let people help. They will want to—they’ll need to, actually, because they’ll feel useless faced with such distress—and allowing them that privilege of assisting is not a form of weakness on your part. Also, it’s often surprising which family members or friends will rise to the occasion with unexpected compassion and grace, and which will be unable to cope with the sadness and consequently disappear and disappoint. That abandonment can be exceedingly painful. So if I can sneak in a bit of advice to people who know someone experiencing a loss: Don’t disappear! There is no “right” thing to say or do, and from my perspective, the one wrong thing to say or do is nothing.
Many of these stories are in the perspective of someone who recently lost someone (within a year). Do you find that the rawness of that loss never really leaves?
While the rawness recedes—in time, and definitely not on any schedule—those potent feelings surface at odd, unpredictable moments. Anniversaries, holidays, the seashell pink of a particular sunset, finding a scrap of paper with his handwriting tucked inside a book…anything might be the trigger. But one of the best—and worst—qualities of life is that it does march on. And we have to find a way to march with it, or at least limp forward, damaged but hanging in there as best we can.
For me, it was challenging to plunge back into that pain as I wrote, but also exhilarating to discover the transformative power of that experience. No one would ever choose that tragedy befall them, but enduring that loss made me a different, better person. One of the benefits of writing from a more emotionally calm point was seeing and feeling these changes in myself.
Continuing on that point, are these stories based on your initial reaction to the loss of your husband? Did you use journal entries to return to that emotional state?
I wrote religiously in a journal for a couple of years after Robb died, which was very helpful for me. As I worked on these stories, I always imagined that I’d go back to reread those journals, but I didn’t. Perhaps I was nervous about seeing who I was back then? Or maybe I didn’t want the stories to feel constrained by what really happened. Mostly, I think it was that certain details and memories are carved deep into my brain. A journal entry felt superfluous.
Did you read many other books about loss during this time? Which were the ones that gave you comfort?
I’ve always turned immediately to books, so early on, I drove to the library and checked out every self-help book on the grief shelf. They gave me a grip on the psychology of grieving and labeled what I was feeling. In a more literary realm, several books I found particularly comforting were the classic by C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed; two books of poetry, Without by Donald Hall and What the Living Do by Marie Howe; and a memoir published way back in 1974 that I found in that first armload from the library, Widow by Lynn Caine. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking had not been published when I was in the thick of that reading, but I snapped it up about one minute after it hit the bookstores.
Who do you hope will find this book? What do you want readers to take away after reading it?
I hope my book is found by the person who has lost a spouse/significant other; the person rebuilding a life after divorce; the person mourning a loss that isn’t immediately recognized by Hallmark, perhaps their best friend or favorite work colleague or married lover; the person reeling from the bad crap that life hurls at us; the person who imagines random and terrible things can’t possibly happen on a Sunday or any day or ever. Each of us has, or will have, a story of loss. But I hope the reader of this book will close the cover (or click the off button) understanding that whether we believe it or not, we are all equipped to survive these losses and find happiness once again.