This week, I read a book by Rachel Ann Nunes: Ariana The Making of a Queen. It was a sweet LDS romance novel that reminded me somewhat of my own. It was recommended to me by a friend because of the resemblance. It's clearly a first book. I see some of the missteps I read about in novice writers like excess of adverbs and flashbacks and an ending that is too perfect to be very believable. But it has a power that I like in its telling of tragedy. Spoiler alert: when the main character's baby dies, I feel it. I know how loss feels, especially loss of a baby that one has held near to her heart as the center of her existence for the first several months of life. There's a potency and power that gives the reader a sense that the writer understands such loss. I wept for Ariana's pain. It was a therapeutic kind of thing, like what I want to do with my writing.
So many writers feature a miscarriage or a child loss as something bad or painful but pretty much gloss over the experience. It's like they're afraid an audience can't handle the pain or don't want to go there. But without showing the depth of agony, the author is betraying the people who have lost like that. They're showing loss as less cataclysmic and life-shaking than it really is. While reading about her loss, I felt I could weep about mine without necessarily reliving it. This is the kind of therapy I think comes from reading fiction that mirrors one's own sadness and trauma. For those who have lost and can handle reading stories about other's loss, I highly recommend it.
