Building a life that incorporates unspeakable grief: Mark Gunther’s Without Jenny

I see that sadly, like your main character, you have also lost a child. So, how did you decide to write about this topic as a novel, rather than a memoir?
Several reasons. First, I wanted to distance myself from the content; writing a novel enabled me to abstract my experience into a managed story arc. Second, I wanted to tell a story that had a beginning, a middle and an end. Child loss has no end, and while I do communicate that, the plot of the novel does bring this family story to a conclusion. Third, in a memoir I think I would be compelled to pontificate — this is what “I did to fix my problem. You can too!” More non-fiction elements would come into play. What I really wanted to do was to communicate the lived experience of grief, the day to day experience of it, how it grinds you and colors everything that happens. The novel form lets that happen; it’s fiction, but it’s true.
Why, or how, did you choose to have a female protagonist?
Similarly, it provided a bit of distance. Second, in the very first exercise I did as the idea of this book just began to take shape, hers was the voice that emerged. Perhaps readers will find the broad range of emotion expressed by this character easier to accept in a female character that a male one, and it was easer to contrast the roller coaster of her responses with the steady way her husband deals with the loss. Finally, the stress on her relationship with her surviving child is more dramatic with the mother than the father.
What do you think people who have never lost a child don’t realize about this kind of grief? What makes this loss unique?
Basically that it is never over. This kind of grief is always in the present tense, as the loss reverberates over the years with all of the markers not celebrated — no graduations, no weddings, no grandchildren. A part of the bereaved parent is always anchored to the moment of the child’s death, no matter how much time passes. One learns to accommodate the loss, although you never accept it. Whether or not the parent was present for the child’s death, the primary job of a parent is to keep the child safe. The bereaved parent has failed at that task, and struggling with the guilt of that is a recurrent theme. Joy struggles mightily with this idea of forgiveness and where or if she might find it.
How important is it to the story that the protagonist is Jewish? Do you think that connection to some sort of religious or spiritual community can help people heal?
Joy’s Judaism is integral to the story she as experiences it. She can’t not be Jewish — it is integral to who she is, culturally and spiritually. She struggles with the Torah stories, struggles with God’s responsibility for Jenny’s death, yet Judaism also provides a road map for her. Judaism has an established process of dealing with death, including annual remembrance of the person on the date of their death. And yes, community of any kind — not necessarily religious — is extraordinarily important in budding a life that includes this never-ending grief.
I’ve heard that ‘bibliotherapy’ is a thing now in the therapy community, where people who experience a crisis are encouraged to write about it and others to read their writing as part of the healing process. Do you have any insights into this, whether trauma in literature can help survivors heal?
There is a lot of research in this area. Art therapies have been practiced for several decades now. Whether dance, crafts, representational art or writing, art provides an important tool for self-expression and can play a significant role processing trauma. However, it doesn’t work for everyone! If a current trauma connects to a deeper, archaic trauma it still will take the intervention of a skilled therapist to help the writer truly ‘out’ their feelings. You can only go as deeply as you can. In my case, the acceptance of my loss and its associated trauma had to happen before I could put a pen to paper. I couldn’t write the story I wanted to tell until my heart had melted enough that I could feel things again.
Mark Gunther’s Without Jenny is available here from publisher Koehler Books.
