JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Aisha Muharrar's debut novel "Loved One" chronicles a series of events in the life of 30-year-old Julia that just don't make sense. The story opens with a moment that looks and feels like one of the endless weddings Julia has been attending - except it's not.
AISHA MUHARRAR: (Reading) This perpetual wedding season was such a well-known truth about people our age that I could feel an awareness of it in the room as I stood up, clutching my own folded sheet of printer paper and began to speak about my dear friend Gabe. It was one of the things I had to avoid saying in Gabe's eulogy - the obvious thing - that he was only 29 and his death was so sudden, by anyone's estimation, it would have been more likely I was speaking at the happiest day of his life.
SUMMERS: It's Julia's effort to understand her relationship with Gabe driving Muharrar's poignant and engrossing story. Aisha Muharrar joins me now. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
MUHARRAR: Thank you.
SUMMERS: So we meet Julia at Gabe's funeral, and Gabe was her first boyfriend. That romance didn't last, but their friendship does. Tell us, where was their relationship when Gabe died?
MUHARRAR: Well, at the time that Gabe dies, their relationship is a bit of a question mark. And that is what Julia is dealing with because for nearly a decade, she and Gabe have been friends since they briefly dated, and then things get a little more complicated before he dies. And we learn more about that as the book goes on. But for Julia, it's difficult because in a moment of loss, you want to remember someone in the best way possible. You want to be able to have closure. And instead, it ends up being this ambiguous loss, and ambiguous loss is different from just a standard loss. An ambiguous loss, someone dies and things are left unsaid or there's a sudden rupture in a relationship. And it's hard to find closure and resolve issues in a relationship when the other person has passed away.
SUMMERS: I mean, hearing you describe that and having read the book, I don't know many of us who haven't experienced some ambiguous loss in our lives, where things end for one reason or another and you're spending all of this time trying to piece together in your mind why everything sort of took the turns that it did, what might have been, reliving all of those little sort of uncertain moments. Why was that notion something that you wanted to explore?
MUHARRAR: I find uncertainty to be a very interesting topic when writing. I knew that I wanted to write a book about grief that would not further depress people. Once I had the story, I was trying to find a way to include moments of joy and lightness and humor in it. But also, I found that for all the characters, because they're all in some way experiencing that loss of Gabe - and even Gabe in the book is at a crossroads in his career and is in a moment of uncertainty as well - and it makes some people reactive, it makes some people shut down. But it's just an interesting area that I wanted to look at.
SUMMERS: So we meet Julia at Gabe's funeral, but Julia also meets Elizabeth for the first time. Tell us who Elizabeth is and why their meeting is so confusing for Julia.
MUHARRAR: Well, Elizabeth is about seven years older than Julia and Gabe, and she's this kind of cool, self-possessed restaurant owner and florist. She's accomplished a lot. She's British. She lives in London. And she is also sober and is very blunt with things that she...
SUMMERS: Yeah.
MUHARRAR: ...Says because part of her recovery has been to be very honest with people. And her interaction with Julia is unsettling because she says to her, when Julia goes to introduce herself, I know exactly who you are, and I know who you were to Gabe. It's something - immediately get defensive. Who does this woman think she is? What does she know about me? And also, well, maybe she does know something, especially because Julia is in this place of uncertainty and unsure what was going on exactly with Gabe before he died. And it's kind of that tension between them where in order to get more information, which they both want, they do have to find a way to communicate with each other.
SUMMERS: I mean, this story is just so subtle and elegant. And one of the things that I loved is that "Loved One," it's all about grief, and yet there is very little, almost no, direct conversation about grief itself. Why did you take that approach?
MUHARRAR: Well, I've experienced loss in my own life. And there are many books about grief now, but when I started writing the book, there weren't as many books that dealt with grief directly in literary fiction. I wanted to write a book about grief that, if you were experiencing loss, you could read it and not feel more depressed by the end. Like...
SUMMERS: Yeah.
MUHARRAR: ...I wanted to write something that was about loss but was very much centered on life because the other thing about loss is that life does go on around you, as difficult as it may be. And I wanted to show that, that there were going to be other parts of Julia's life that were still going on, that Gabe had left, but the relationship question marks he had left behind were still there. And I felt that the way to express that in the book would come from how people naturally behave. Like, you are in one moment thinking about someone who's not there anymore. And then another moment, someone's asking you what you want for dinner. And it goes back and forth.
And I think a lot of that also has to do with the characters of Julia and Elizabeth. They - they're getting to know each other. So there's a limit to how much they would even reveal and how much they would go into their true feelings about what they're missing. So that relationship allows us to kind of be on the surface of the grief.
SUMMERS: I guess one thing I wonder is, in constructing these characters and researching this book, did it at all change the way that you think about grief yourself and the ways that you've experienced it in the past?
MUHARRAR: Yes. Well, absolutely, it did. I read the book that the famous five stages of grief are about. Elisabeth Kubler Ross wrote the stages of grief, and it's actually a common mistake that people think that she wrote that for the grieving, but she originally wrote that for the dying, people who were dying of a terminal illness...
SUMMERS: Yeah.
MUHARRAR: ...And the stages that they went through. And then she wrote another book about grieving using those stages after she realized so many people were using it that way. And in that book, she talks about the different ways people grieve, how it's expressed. And I think it was a combination of two things. I was researching grief, but it also happened I started writing the book after I had experienced loss in my own life. And it was a season where I lost four people close to me.
SUMMERS: Oh.
MUHARRAR: And then, as I was writing the book, as life goes on, there were other losses. It was during the pandemic. And I think what I learned is that in those years, yes, I think grief has touched all of us. And when I was writing the book, I thought of Julia's story as a long journey to feel a feeling because it can take a while to fully feel everything that grief brings up. And it is those stages of denial, anger, sadness. It's all of that, but there are so many other things that come up. So I really wanted to slow down with that process with Julia and Elizabeth and just see how that plays out.
SUMMERS: I mean, Julia and Elizabeth, over the course of the book, build this pretty unlikely relationship between the two of them with Gabe sort of at the center, even though he's no longer alive. How does the relationship that Julia builds with Elizabeth ultimately help her understand her feelings for Gabe?
MUHARRAR: The very first glimmer of the idea came from a cab ride I took with a friend of mine. And her friend was dating my ex-boyfriend. And my ex had been, you know, a pretty good boyfriend, no notes - very nice breakup, totally fine. But her friend was not having a good experience with him. And I think what Julia and Elizabeth are going through is something that any of us would experience. If you were in a room with someone who had dated someone you had dated, or if one of your exes was in a room with another one of your exes, where would they overlap? Would they agree about who you are as a person? And just being around Elizabeth causes Julia to look at Gabe in a different way because this is someone who's had a completely different experience with him.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with author Aisha Muharrar. Her new book is "Loved One." Thank you so much.
MUHARRAR: Thank you.
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