An Interview with Andrea Gilats regarding After Effects: A Memoir of Complicated Grief

Interview by Whitney Jacobson

We are told not to judge a book by its cover, but covers do tell a story, and yours is an image of Tom. Please share with us how and why your cover design came to be.

I had known since the beginning that I wanted to use that image of Tom on the cover of After Effects, and I knew I wanted it to fill the page. He is, after all, the most essential, pivotal character in the memoir, and I wanted to make sure not to lose sight of him even though most of the book takes place after his death. I had seen other book covers done in this way, including some that were especially potent in their ability to broadcast intense emotion. When the University of Minnesota Press put Tom’s image in the hands of gifted book artist Amanda Weiss, she created a cover that exceeded all my hopes.

What was your writing process while composing After Effects? Did you have a particular writing set-up that fostered your writing?

My writing practice has been constant for several years. I rise, have breakfast, pour my coffee, and head to my combination study/studio/library. After opening my trusty iMac, I read the morning newspapers and answer correspondence. Then I write until late morning, usually about three hours. My light, peaceful home-for-one, with its lovely downtown and river views of St. Paul, makes an ideal environment for creative work, and because writing is an especially engrossing creative process, I’m able to immerse myself in it without interruption. 

For readers who are unfamiliar with the experience of complicated grief, would you please summarize it?

Dr. M. Katherine Shear, founder and director of Columbia University’s Center for Complicated Grief, says that complicated grief (now officially called prolonged grief disorder by the World Health Organization) is a “superimposed process that alters grief and modifies its course for the worse.” Grief is considered complicated if it continues to be acute for at least a year after the loss and if the bereaved person is experiencing persistent yearning or longing for the person who has died, a recurring desire to die in order to be reunited with that person, refusal to believe that the grieving person’s loved one is really gone forever, inappropriately intense reactions to memories of the person who has died, and “distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.” Because of Dr. Shear’s groundbreaking work, there are now treatments for this heartbreaking disorder.

In chapters three and five, you weave in some research about complicated / prolonged grief. What did your research process look like for After Effects? How did you decide what research to incorporate, and what effect did you hope the research would have on readers?

As I say in the introduction to After Effects, I only learned about complicated grief after I began writing the book. I think I may have been about third of the way into a first draft when I casually googled, “How long should grief last?” That search led me to the work of Dr. M. Katherine Shear, the world’s foremost researcher on complicated grief. The moment I read Dr. Shear’s descriptions of complicated grief’s characteristics and symptoms, I knew with deep certainty I had suffered from the disorder. This earth-shattering realization underpinned the rest of the writing.

In writing After Effects, I only incorporated research I felt would help tell my story. My goal was to share my unique human experience knowing that in each of us, there is something of meaning for all of us. I’m not an expert on complicated grief, but my research, combined with my firsthand experience, has given me insight into this disorder, thereby allowing me to speak credibly about it. 

There were a few times where your text reminded me of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, such as when you ponder “Leaving was probably inevitable, but without our home as our North Star, would Tom be able to find me? Would we be severed from each other forever?” (p. 188). Did you read other grief memoirs before composing yours? If so, which ones? What effect did they have on your writing?

I read The Year of Magical Thinking in 2005, when it was first published, but I didn’t think about it again until 2020, when I was writing a book proposal for After Effects. I briefly discussed it in the “competitors” section of my book proposal along with A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates and The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander. I read those two books while I was writing After Effects. Unlike After Effects, all three memoirs were written during their authors’ first year of grieving.

In the acknowledgements at the close of After Effects, I mention the only two books that deeply affected me during my time of hardest grieving. Neither are memoirs: one is Without, Donald Hall’s heartrending collection of poems about his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia at the age of forty-seven; and A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis’s wrenching journal written in the aftermath of the death of his wife, poet Joy Davidman, who died of breast cancer at the age of forty-five.

What was the most challenging aspect of writing about your grief, and how did you manage to overcome it?

The hardest part of writing about my grief was reliving it. I only managed to write After Effects because so time much time had passed since I lost Tom. Even then it was the most difficult task I have ever attempted. Reading the manuscript is still emotionally challenging for me, so I’m hoping when I read excerpts publicly I’ll be able to keep my composure.

What did your revising and editing process for After Effects look like? What strategies did you use and how long did it take you?

Once I had a complete first draft of the book, I met with a publishing consultant, a book doctor who had helped me with Restoring Flexibility, my first book. Her honest suggestions helped me find an effective strategy for revision and editing. First, I got rid of everything I felt would not help my reader understand my experience of complicated grief. Then, having cleared out what was not germane, I carefully went through the manuscript searching for places where I should have or could have gone deeper. This process resulted in about three months of rewriting, which was followed by feedback from four trusted early readers.

One of the most interesting challenges I faced in writing After Effects was wrestling with how to show the passage of time. The book tells a true story, so its facts proceed through time, but After Effects’ structure is not entirely chronological. It has several hiccups and wrinkles I felt were necessary to preserve the fluidity that is so essential to a meaningful reading experience. In the end, I was satisfied with the structure, but it took lots of teeth-gnashing to get there. 

Chapter two shares selected excerpts from the 754 letters you wrote to Tom. What did you hope readers would take away from those passages in sum?

I had two goals as I considered including excerpts from the letters. First, I wanted to share with readers a selection of unmediated accounts of my grief at the time I was suffering most severely. (Keep in mind the rest of After Effects was written two decades after Tom died.) Second, I wanted to share the story of my colleague Carol’s grief, which, as the letters show, followed what I eventually learned was a perfectly normal course. After a year of grieving, Carol was on her way to a satisfying life in widowhood, and I was still drowning in acute grief. When I finally read the letters so many years later, I was amazed to see I had recognized this difference at the time it was happening. 

I hadn’t known about the Split Rock Arts Program prior to reading this book, but I appreciated learning about it as well as seeing the other connections to Minnesota embedded throughout the book (University of Minnesota, the Minnesota State Fair, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, etc.) How did place factor into your writing of After Effects?

I think time and place are essential elements of storytelling, whether factual or fictional. I’m a lifelong Minnesotan, as was Tom, and we happily lived our lives as Minnesota boosters. I received my undergraduate degree from the University of Minnesota and went on to work there for thirty-four years, so that place was my bedrock for most of my adult life. In anything I write, I love including references that cultivate familiarity, whether through specific locales, activities like holiday celebrations and vacations, or facts of nature like weather, including, in After Effects, Minnesota’s seasons. I believe these kinds of commonalities foster empathy in readers. At the same time, I want to honor my reader as a respected acquaintance for whom I also feel great empathy. 

As your memoir is published, who do you hope will read it? What effect do you hope it will have on readers or the larger world?

I hope After Effects will be read by people who have suffered or are suffering from complicated grief, and by people who might know and love someone who is suffering. I hope it will be read by people who have lost a loved one or who will, inevitably, lose a loved one someday. I hope it will be read by people who counsel or minister to those who are grieving. I hope it will be read by people who are interested in and appreciate the necessity of a literature of loss.

Empathy is the overriding theme of After Effects, so I hope it will be read by all who empathize with all of us who have lost a loved one to COVID-19. Our path forward is paved with empathy, so we must all try to understand what it feels like to walk in someone else’s shoes.

What’s the best piece of writerly advice you’ve been given? Or, what writerly advice would you give someone writing their first memoir?

For many years, I have treasured the words of the late Louise de Salvo, author of Writing as a Way of Healing. She said: “To improve health, we must write detailed accounts linking feelings with events. The more writing succeeds as narrative—by being detailed, organized, compelling, vivid, lucid—the more health and emotional benefits are derived from writing” (p. 22).

We must try to write simultaneously not only about what happened, but about how we feel about what happened. We need both in order to make meaning. Judith Barrington, author of Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, advises us to write “musings” along with scenes and summaries. 

Who or what are your literary influences? Why them? How do they affect you?

Several years ago, I was introduced to Rebecca Solnit when I read The Far Away Nearby. I had read only thirty or forty pages when I found myself exclaiming out loud, “I want to write like this!” The same thing happened when I read Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. This amazing book took my breath away from page one. Both brilliant writers have their own unique, captivating way of weaving together perfectly chosen words to create intricate sentences that contain utterly unexpected, highly original meanings. There is no doubt in my mind that beautiful language can imbue even the most mundane subject with transcendence; that is what, as a forever student, I try to do in my writing. 

If you were venturing into the wilderness (alone) for a month, what three books would you take with you and why? 

I don’t think I could live through a month alone in the wilderness no matter how many books were with me, but here are three I feel would be indispensable. 

First, I would take The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, a beautifully produced, appropriately weighty book for the ages. Never has a poet said so much in so few words. Though she is no longer with us, Lucille remains a national treasure whose poems should be required reading for all Americans. 

Second, I would take a book I just finished reading, The Sisters of Auschwitz by Dutch author Roxane van Iperen. It has been many years, probably since I read Ann Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down in 2012, since I have been so moved by a book. Both history and memoir, it is the kind of rare record to which nothing I could write here would do justice. It is impossible to put down.

Finally, I would take Painting Chinese: A Lifelong Teacher Gains the Wisdom of Youth, a small memoir by renowned American educator Herbert Kohl. I love this book so much that I have given it as a gift many times. After retiring from a long career—Kohl wrote twenty-three groundbreaking books for educators—he was looking for something to fill his time. Though not artistically inclined, he decided to take a painting class. From the book jacket: “When he arrived for his first lesson, he was surprised to learn that the class was in Chinese landscape painting. He was even more surprised to see that his fellow students were all Chinese and between the ages of four and seven.”

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After Effects: A Memoir of Complicated Grief by Andrea Gilats is being published by University of Minnesota Press and will be available for purchase February 15, 2021. The book is available for pre-order online at www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/after-effects. Links to the book on IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon can also be found on the author’s website: andreagilats.com.