Dad Talks #8 : Jayson Greene

In conversation with the author about love and loss

Full disclosure straight from the top: I haven’t read Jayson Greene’s book. I’m not sure I can or ever will be able to because I don’t know if I have to stomach or the emotional strength to read about the loss of a child, which is exactly what Greene’s book, Once More We Saw Stars, is about.

Greene and his wife lost their two-year-old daughter Greta after a freak accident in New York City, a tragedy I can’t begin to fathom. However, Jayson Greene is a writer and so it seems that a natural part of his process was to write his story.

That story became Greene’s debut memoir, a celebrated book about grief.

As someone who has written a bit about my own grief, I was curious as to what role the process of writing this book played in the evolution of Jayson’s grief.

A lightly condensed version of our conversation follows. You can check out Once More We Saw Stars here.

After you published your book, what was it like to go out night after night and relive this event in front of a room full of people, in front of a microphone on a podcast, or in front of cameras, talking about what I assume is the most difficult thing you’ve had to endure?

Anyone whose ever published a book is familiar with this weird, out-of-body sensation you get when you’re talking about your book. And most people who choose to write books, to spend that much time alone doing a thing, are not exactly the most extroverted people. But I just kind of strapped myself in and told myself that I was going to be doing this thing for X number of weeks. In most cases, I knew way ahead of time what I was doing, who I was talking to, and where they were coming from. And that really helped sort of propel me through talking about it.

As far as, then how it was to be doing the interviews on a case-by-case basis, when you go through tragedy, there’s this sort of misunderstanding or fear that someone talking to you is going to do something bad just by asking a question. But the truth of the matter is that the bad thing has already happened. And in this case, it was years in the rearview. Also, I was not out there involuntarily. I put a book out. If anything, I was probably feeling way more grateful for the person who was engaging me. And they were engaged me on the basis of what I had written, so I had an idea of what they were going to be asking me.

Just because the conversation happens to be about the death of your daughter, all of that allows you to feel very in control about these conversations.

The death of my daughter doesn’t cease to be a fact outside of the publication of this book. It’s something I live with forever and so I would always try to put people at ease. Like, “You are not going to trigger a breakdown just by asking me a question.”

In a way, it was an honor for me. There are plenty of people who’ve had their kid die who don’t get that kind of attention. They don’t get to be in a room full of people who are feeling for them. And I was entirely an exception to the rule. And for me, that was part of the process of the catharsis of writing the book.

What was the conversation like with your wife when you decided to pursue telling this story as a book?

By the time I had come to presenting material to the New York Times for an op-ed (Ed note: that op-ed led to the book), that was the tip of an iceberg of writing that had been going on for a year. I had, at that point, already met with agents about the idea. My wife and I had already been talking about it together. She was emphatic that it was a good thing for me and, in a murkier way, for us. There was an aspect of our story that was so uncomfortably public that there was a need to put a version of the story into the world that came from us.

How involved was she in the process of writing the book?

I would share with her portions of it and check in with her. I do know at some point, I showed her the first forty pages, which was the most cathartic and painful part of the story because it was the story of the accident; the worst night of our lives. And she sat down and she cried reading it. But she didn’t stop reading and say, “That was great, Jayson.” She would say, “Well make sure you include this,” or “Make sure this gets in there,” or “That’s actually not what the nurse said. The nurse said this. You need to fix that.”

So she really wanted to make sure the story felt true to her, too. And she did that right up until the book was sold and then after, right up until I finished the manuscript. She would read through it, she would mark it up. She had a very profound influence on what the book became.

You’ve had a son since you lost Greta. What was the most lasting thing you learned about yourself as a father throughout this process?

There’s that saying that grief is love that has lost its object, right? So when you grieve, you are reminded above all of your own capacity to love and how profoundly you are able to feel those feelings. In some ways, there is a way in which grief can be a powerful emotion for good. It doesn’t always put us in the best version of ourselves but it can. Any grief process will at some point put you in touch with some sort of exalted version of who you believe you are in this world. And so when you think about how that affects you as a parent, if you weren’t already the sort of person who valued the little moments in the course of a day, you became that person. If you were that person, you became more of that person. The nothing time, when nothing of interest is happening, the times when you’re not always excited to be doing what you’re doing together; I’m reminded of the importance of those moments and how important they were to me when one of my children was gone.

What books did you turn to in the wake of the loss of Greta?

I had a list of books about grief or death but they weren’t necessarily the kind of books that were the grief or death that we were dealing with. The really obvious one was Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is as incredibly spare, clear-eyed, and lucid piece of writing about that state. I read that and was reminded of something.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi was another huge bestseller but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that one also. I’ve actually become social-media friends, not quite real friends, with Lucy Kalanithi, who is Paul’s widow. And Lucy has read my book and sent me this incredible picture. Her daughter had decorated the cover of my book, which is a picture of Greta, and she wanted me to see this connection.

A small book of fiction by a guy named Max Porter called Grief is a Thing with Feathers opened up my brain to what writing about grief could look like and feel like, because it was entirely metaphorical. It was a book where the intensity of the feeling was mirrored entirely by the musicality of the language.

An Abridged History of Rainfall is a book of poetry by a guy named Jay Hopler. It’s about his father dying. After I read that, I wrote the scene in the book where my son is born. There’s a lot of metaphysical energy flying through those poems that really resonated with me.

And finally a book by an Australian woman named Helen Garner who wrote a lightly fictionalized account of caring for her friend with cancer at the end of her life. It’s called The Spare Room. It was hard and ugly, one of the angriest and darkest books about end of life without feeling like I was made to wallow in someone else’s unprocessed rage or emotions. It’s just really beautiful and so that one really hit me hard.

Now that your book is done, it’s out in the world, you’ve done all the promotion and all, do you still write about grief? Did this book serve as something specific or was it more of a snapshot of your output that is ongoing?

On some level I think I’ll always be writing about grief. But not about mine. I will never do that again. I have no interest in doing that again. It was a definitive project in my life and I don’t feel the need to ever do that again

But right now, I’m working on a novel and that’s kind of a refracted take on our lives. There’s a death of a child in it. You know, these things live in your subconscious forever. So I imagine that, yes, grief will be a part of my writing forever.

And I don’t say this to cast aspersions on anyone else but I didn’t have the desire to go out and become the face of grief. I think a lot of other people can find solace and community; they might do a podcast or a Ted Talk on grief, and spearhead a community. I admire the people who do that. But I didn’t have any desire to do that.

Finally, the question I always close these interviews with: what kind of father was your father? What lessons did he give you that you’ve carried forward as a father? And what have you consciously tried to avoid and do differently?

My father was a surgeon and for a lot of my childhood, he was working really hard. My memories of my father are that he was incredibly kind and unselfconsciously selfless. He would show up in the middle of the night, no question asked. It’s a cliché, but he would give you the shirt off his back. He was reflexively selfless and I always admired that about him. He also showed me what it looked like when you devoted yourself to something. He cared very, very much about what he did, about his patients, and how he took care of them.

My father wasn’t around a lot. He couldn’t be. He didn’t know what day I had band practice. He knew what my friends name were but not much beyond that. And so I would like to be around a lot more on a day-to-day basis. I want to be the kind of dad who does know whether my son has finished his homework sheet or whatever. I’m sure that’s a reaction to that.