I love non fiction. It makes me feel smarter, informed, and if knowledge is power, then powerful too. I love the active feeling of learning, of feeling like I’m a better person for having read the thing. And for a long time, I only felt that way about non-fiction, and maybe biography/memoirs. My own inner critic still whines a bit about wasting my time when I pick up fiction. But my inner critic is on the wrong track.
Here’s the irony – even when I know this bit about my inner critic getting it wrong to be absolutely true for me, I went out on a search of non-fiction research and scientific inquiry to validate my opinion. The good news is that I found support for my shifting world view on stories, the not so good news is that I fully felt I needed someone else with significant credentials to tell me what I felt in my own mind and skin was correct.
What started this recent journey was the tears and waves of empathy that arrived when I read a beautiful, well-informed romance series that featured grief more like a main character than a side quest to come back from in a page or two. It was grief in forms I am unlikely to personally experience, grief classifications I have read a significant amount to try to understand, but non-fiction and scientific studies fall far short of what it feels like to be in it. I know that logically, but how does one get closer to that inner knowing of what someone is going through instead of a book definition slapped on them like a label?
I am honored that I get to work with folks in some of the deepest, most raw forms of grief regularly, and the range of love and loss and pain that have been shared through the last few years of this work is almost unimaginable. I’ve heard a lot of stories and yet I know I have heard barely any of the stories out there because there are almost 8 billion people on this planet and I can’t talk to or support even the tiniest fraction of them, even with my whole heart in it.
In my grief work and world, the newest non-fiction titles tend to get shared. There is this undercurrent, the idea that we can intellectualize grief – bring it to it’s knees by knowing it’s name and characteristics. The idea is not entirely wrong, knowing that so much of what someone feels is completely normal (but not talked about) cannot be overvalued in a world where grief typically feels isolating. And this idea that facts and figures will save us from the pain flies in the face of what I do and see. In my work with yoga and movement and embodiment, I offer staying present to this moment and sitting with feelings when it would be far easier to try to think our way through grief like it is an escape room we just have to figure out so we can get back to the so-called regular life.
I know all of that, and yet I look to non-fiction. There are non-fiction grief books on my night stand right now waiting for my attention. There are tabs open on my browser for continuing education, seeking places I could add letters after my name, certify more knowledge, understand better from more experty experts. Yet the best educational course I’ve had in grief might have just come from a fiction romance series. That fact slightly embarrasses me, but also enthralls me.
There is a long history of books and media specific to grief that fall into the educational area and the memoir space of classifications. While these can be helpful and incredibly necessary, they also don’t typically reach an audience that isn’t experiencing or supporting active grief, which makes them less helpful in expanding the understanding of grief into the broader world.
Even in my own ever evolving grief story, I initially had a limited understanding of all the ways grief could show up, linger, and bring havoc – because our individual stories are just that – unique to us. My story isn’t your story. We might understand each other a bit because our individual griefs overlap in key feelings and we might have a shared language post grief, but without experiencing your loss the way you feel it in your life – how can I understand more? The answer just might be embracing more stories.
Research suggests that emotional involvement in fictional books (like when a book makes you cry or throw it across the room) increases empathy, a result that did not occur in the controlled study of non-fiction readers. And this is where I get excited about well informed, beautiful fiction. When grief and grieving are presented as a normal part of all types of stories, and when people can (for lack of a better phrase) “try on” the complicated emotions of grief through stories, the benefits ripple out.
These types of stories open doors for folks not in grief (or not yet recognizing their grief) to get curious and to soften the inner narratives that I believe we all hold about what grief is and isn’t, should and shouldn’t be. Grief is a lot of things, and one thing it is not is “done” by the next scene or chapter the way it has often been presented. Grief in our real lives isn’t scripted with one touching scene and then a dark screen to bring us to the next plot point (aka ‘moving on’).
Which brings me fully to the moment where something as simple as a story that exists only on paper or a screen can offer us so much. A fully developed story has the ability to give us not just a view, but a seemingly first person experience of love and grief, and from that experience we gain a key skill – the ability to recognize different forms of grief as something we’ve felt before. And if we’ve felt even a tiny piece of it, we know it is truth.
That recognition takes everyone on a new journey. Instead of staring into something wild and unknown, recognizing the massive range of things that are normal grief can allow us each to be so much more compassionate and empathetic with ourselves and with others. We read a story, and if we can let ourselves fully go on that journey, we come back with empathy and understanding. With thoughtful fiction we open the door to the knowing that grief weaving through not just a scene but an entire story is normal and with that, we can create the space for connection when grief inevitably arrives.
I particularly love romance novels, and I’ve opened up more about what I’ve classified as that guilty pleasure a few times before. What’s not to love about a genre of happy endings and neatly tied up story lines after a dramatic, emotional nearly breaking apart about 3/4 of the way through? I’ve sat happily in that bubble of romantic escapism not thinking much about it, until I was thinking very much about it when I stumbled into love stories that weren’t a match for my heteronormative experience, stories with characters of less typical romance novel body types, stories that stared neurodiverse characters. But while they mostly still fit the formula or romance novel, I loved feeling like I deeply knew more kinds of love.
Most recently I was blown away by the Flight and Glory Series by Rebecca Yarros because of her incredibly deep dive and well informed approach to grief. While following the seemingly standard setup of stunning women pairing up with outrageously good looking military men across five love stories, she also deeply covered (as major plot points) grief of parent loss, complicated grief (and the intensive counseling that can treat it), traumatic grief, survivor’s guilt/grief, secondary losses, and collective grief.
In stories that were still sexy and wrapped up in love and with happily ever after well into the epilogues, she invited grief onto page after page. Grief in all its raw and ugly forms was allowed to guide the story – to test romantic and platonic relationships in very real ways, to be treated professionally, discussed openly, and for the characters to mess it up then seek resolution. “The Reality of Everything” (Book 5) has a title that for me says it all, and is one of the best depictions of complicated grief and explanation of it that I’ve read in any format – fiction or non. It tore my heart apart and put it back together knowing this story, and recognizing it is a version of what is true for many people.
On the TV side, nothing captured my love for embracing grief the way “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist” did. Anticipatory grief drives season 1, while season 2 covers navigating the afters of loss. Both seasons touch on the challenges of both receiving and offering support in grief along with the complications of working a day job while in grief and navigating friendships and family when everyone has deep, valid feelings. I still wonder how our world might shift if we could hear the heart songs of those around us. Would we all be a little softer? Easier on each other? More compassionate and supportive? And what song would my heart be singing?
I’m leaning in in balance for now. I still love research and facts and figures and things that can be measured. Without those spaces, the therapeutic progress that has been made in treating things like complicated grief and ptsd wouldn’t exist the way they do. And I’m trusting the work I do with bodies – with guiding people to sit with feelings, to trust this moment and breath. And I’m embracing stories, both the real ones people tell me and the fictional ones amazing creators are putting out into the world. Stories are how we share our experiences. Fiction give me access to a way of understanding things I probably won’t experience in my own skin. Great fiction stories let me feel all the things – just for a little bit. And it’s nice to know the tears are creating tracks of empathy, that the echoes of those stories will linger in my heart and head.
A touch of the research I mentioned: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3559433/
All content I share here, elsewhere on my websites and in social media is created by me, Alison Gurevich – and not AI. When you find typos or grammar errors, celebrate humanity. Wait – maybe this would be my heart song right now….https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3wKzyIN1yk (Human by Rag N Bone Man)