On Writing and Buying Lemons: An Exclusive Guest Post from Alison Espach, Author of Notes On Your Sudden Disappearance, Our May Fiction Pick 

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When I was younger, people often said, “Write what you know,” and it deeply worried me. What I knew then was grief, and I hated grief. I hated songs about it, hated movies about it, and hated books about it, especially the good ones. I had been living with grief ever since my brother died when I was fourteen, and I didn’t need more of it. The sadness was all over me, like smoke that people at school could smell no matter how many times I washed my clothes. 

So, when I moved to St. Louis to start my adult life in my early twenties, I bought new clothes and drank a lot and read books that made me laugh and took me far away from my life. Yet grief has ways of showing up in the strangest places — there I was in the grocery store, buying a lemon for a party I was hosting, thinking about how my brother never lived long enough to do anything so mundane. There I was, home from my first book launch, crying because I was lucky enough to live out my childhood dream and my brother was not. Every step forward was like this; every good thing became a bad thing. Then, it didn’t feel like acting out unprocessed grief — it just felt like loyalty. Like if I truly became happy even for just a moment, that’s when my brother would die. 

But in my thirties, as I watched everyone around me settle deeply into their adult lives and go to therapy and move beyond their childhood traumas, I had to ask: why did buying a lemon at the store make me sad? Why did grief keep showing up to ruin everything? 

A therapist at the time challenged me to love the thing I hated most about myself. I couldn’t imagine loving my own sadness, but I could start by trying to love other people’s. I began to read books that sounded unbearably depressing and became slowly enchanted. I read Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of A Figment of My Imagination and fell a little in love with her sentences. I was stunned by the way Ann Hood unapologetically detailed a woman’s shock and despair after losing her daughter in The Knitting Circle. I read A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, who wrote about how wrong it felt when he sometimes forgot about his dead wife. These books were honest, but never shameful — they were beautiful records of how deeply these authors were able to love. 

I looked back at my notebooks where I kept unfinished lists of things I wanted to tell my brother: “I bought a lemon today. Were you ever old enough to do anything that adult, like go to the store just for a lemon?” I started to make new notes, because when I finally looked at my grief with a little love, I didn’t see it as evidence of a ruined person. I saw it as very human. Something beautiful even. The beginnings of a book about what I knew.  

While Notes On Your Sudden Disappearance is fiction, the narrator Sally Holt takes similar notes on her life after her sister Kathy dies. At first, Sally chronicles what she thinks Kathy would want to hear most: the details of Kathy’s sudden death and the drama of her grieving boyfriend Billy. But as Sally gets older, and her connection to Billy deepens into romance, the book asks the central question of my twenties and thirties — how do we go on living and loving in the shadow of someone’s absence? 

So now I pass the challenge on to you: today, try to love the thing you hate most about yourself. What surprising thing has it given you?