Grief is one of the most universal human experiences, which means countless stories have already been written about it. Yet for an author with their own experience of loss, that shouldn’t be a reason to avoid the subject. In fact, the details that make your grief uniquely yours may be exactly what allows your writing to connect so deeply with someone else. The most powerful stories about loss don’t try to capture grief in general, but instead explore it through one person, one relationship, and one absence. When written with honesty and specificity, readers can recognize something of themselves within that experience, even if the finer details don’t completely align.

This week, Ginger explores that contradiction through his own recent loss and some of the books that helped him process his grief. Along with explaining why writing about your specific experience, rather than grief in the abstract, can be more effective, he also describes why authors should embrace complicated emotions and resist the urge to wrap everything up neatly. For authors willing to put their own experiences on the page, today’s post is a reminder that even the most commonly told human stories can still have value when told from a perspective no one else can truly replicate.

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Just a few weeks ago, the inevitable happened.

I got the news that my 89-year-old father had fallen while on his daily walk. He’d been hospitalized, and the prognosis wasn’t good. I live in New York. He lives with my mother in the middle of rural France. I was on a plane within 48 hours.

It’s a situation that I knew my sister and I would face at some point or other. Time has a frustrating habit of ticking inexorably along no matter how much we focus on other things, and as my father kept mentioning during our increasingly infrequent weekly phonecalls: “I’m not getting any younger.”

But that doesn’t make the reality of losing a parent any easier.

As I found myself with hours and hours to think during my long voyage to the commune of Vernoux-en-Gâtine in western France, I couldn’t help but think of the absurdity of what I was experiencing. The paradox at the heart of parental loss is that—statistically speaking—it’s one of the most common human experiences there is. If you are fortunate enough to have known your parents, the overwhelming likelihood is that you get to be as lucky as I am and outlive them.

(My late brother didn’t have that luck.)

But at the same time, to lose your parent feels like something no one else has ever experienced before. The relationship you had with your parent was yours alone, nobody else can possibly understand what that was like. Nobody else went to Farnborough Air Show with my father when they were a boy. Nobody else closed down Harry’s Bar in Paris with two American girls back in the early 2000s like we did. Our experiences with our parents are specific to us and to the particular, unrepeatable chemistry of the bond we had with our parent. Nobody else could ever grieve for this exact person. Nobody else will ever lose what you lost.

This is what makes the loss of a parent so bewildering. The world around you recognises your grief—people nod, they understand, they say “I’m so sorry, I know how hard it is—and they mean it, because they do know, or they will. 

But they can’t know your version of it. 

They couldn’t possibly know the specific weight of it. You find yourself grieving in a language everybody speaks, but in a dialect entirely your own.

It was only after sitting with this thought after seeing my father for what will inevitably be the last time that I began to understand why parental loss has inspired so much of our most enduring literature, memoir, and film. Not simply because the experience isn’t just common, but practically universal—but also because it sits at that precise intersection: An experience shared enough to create immediate resonance with strangers, yet unique enough to be purely, inexorably your own.

The Books That Held Me

Grief makes readers of us all. In the fog of bereavement, we reach for books the way we reach for light switches in dark rooms, hoping something will illuminate the shape of what we’re moving through. Literature about loss is vast and varied, but a few works stand apart for the way they honor that central contradiction: the universal experience rendered with devastating particularity.

There are two books that have already made a serious impact on me when it comes to processing grief. Following the death of my brother, I read (at my mother’s recommendation) Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight—part of her memoir sequence that deals with the loss and inheritance experienced after the death of her father, and an exploration of the grief passed down through generations in families shaped by upheaval. 

Fuller writes about love and loss with a rawness that feels almost reckless. You trust her because she trusts you with everything. 

The second is Kim Sherwood’s Testament, which I also first read following the death of my brother. It’s a deeply moving story of two brothers reuniting after the Holocaust, which she wrote after the death of her grandfather (the highly respected British actor George Baker.)

The book focused largely on the protagonist Eva, and the modern-day aftermath of the death of her grandfather, but much of it was also the tale of her grandfather’s relationship with his brother, and the complications they encountered as they both sought to build new lives after escaping the death camps of World War II.

It was that which resonated most strongly with me, and had me wiping tears from my eyes at the climax of the book. So much of it was outside of my experience, a book about Jewish brothers following the Holocaust, and a young British film student investigating her grandfather’s legacy. This was definitely not the kind of book that should have felt like it was written just for me.

Yet, the brilliant way in which Sherwood weaved the tale of these two brothers together felt so powerful and resonant that I ended up feeling exactly like it was.

These are both books written by authors gripped by their own grief, which runs like a fault line through so much of their storytelling. But at the same time, their deeply personal experiences can’t help but resonate with those of us going through the same experience.

It reminded me of the importance of writing about your experience of loss, even if it seems like something that so many people have written about before. We keep telling this story because we keep needing to, both for our own sake, and for those who find solace in your story when they experience loss for the first time.

Things Worth Considering

If you’re sitting with a loss—whether recent or long-carried—and you feel the pull to write about it, here are some things I would encourage you to hold in mind:

• Write the specific, not the general. The temptation in grief writing is to reach for the universal, to write about “loss” in the abstract. Resist it. Write about the particular: the smell of a specific room, the exact thing that was left unsaid, the way your person held a cup. The universal will arrive through the particular, not instead of it.
• Honor the contradiction. Many people grieve parents or family members who they had difficult relationships with, or perhaps even hated. Embrace that. Don’t smooth over the paradoxes in your grief. The love and the resentment. The relief and the guilt. The closeness and the distance. Contradiction is where truth lives.
• Let time be strange. Grief doesn’t move in a straight line. Your writing doesn’t have to either. Moving between past and present, between who your parent was and who they became, is not confusion, it’s accuracy. It’s one of the things I loved about Testament, in fact; how the two timelines were so far apart, and yet so deeply intertwined.
• Write what others won’t say. This is your opportunity to show real courage in what you write. Grief is surrounded by social scripts. The memoir or essay that breaks those scripts—that says something difficult, strange, or uncomfortable-but-true—is the one that will matter to other readers.
• Give yourself permission not to resolve it. The best writing about grief doesn’t end with consolation, but with clarity. You don’t have to arrive anywhere. You don’t need to complete a story circle. You just have to write about the experience clearly and honestly, even if that leaves it hanging open.

Write It Down. It Matters.

I am still in the early days of this. My father’s voice is still recent enough that I can hear it clearly when I close my eyes. The house in France still exists in the present tense in my mind. I’m not yet sure what I will write when I eventually do, only that I have to write something. Because not to do so feels like a kind of abandonment—of him, of the experience, and of what it meant.

To you—whoever you are, wherever you are in your own journey of grief—I want to say this:

What you’ve lived through is yours in a way that nothing else is. Your relationship with the person you lost was entirely unique. The shape of their absence in your life is something nobody else will ever truly understand in quite the same way you understand it, but that’s not a reason to stay silent. That’s the reason to write.

As self-published authors, we have something that traditional publishing gatekeepers have not always valued—the freedom to write the true thing, in the true way, without waiting for permission. Writing about loss is one of the biggest opportunities to do just that, and there are readers who want to read that truth and see if for themselves.

Grief literature isn’t a niche. It isn’t a subcategory. It appears in all genres—from sci-fi to romance—and in whatever form it takes, it’s some of the most important writing human beings have ever produced, because writing about grief is where we try to make sense of the thing that frightens us more than anything. Death. 

Your story belongs in that tradition.

So write about who they were. Write about who you were with them. Write about the gap they have left in your life, and the strange, heavy, irreplaceable fact of having loved them. Commit it to the page. Give it permanence. Make your love, anger, or sorrow for this person continue for longer than they do.

The cultural lexicon of grief—the great shared library of human loss—was built one person at a time and it will never be completed. Each story was written by somebody deciding that their particular sorrow was worth recording and the fact that a story exists at all shows us that it was.

Your chapter belongs there too.

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