W
hen people ask me how I
wrote my memoir, Once
More We Saw Stars, I find
myself at a loss for words.
The irony is not lost on me. My daugh-
ter, Greta, died at the age of two when
a brick fell off a building and hit her.
She was rushed to the hospital and
never recovered. Fifteen months later,
my wife and I welcomed our son, Har-
rison, into the world. Everyone agreed
there were no words for this stuff, and
yet whatever words there were, clearly
I had found them.
But then someone would ask about
this or that narrative or authorial de-
cision and my mind would go blank. I
would cough up something that I hoped
pleased them, and then I would wonder:
How did I do this? How could I not find
the words to tell how I found the words?
Maybe every debut book is a mystery
to its author—maybe every book after
that is too. Writing tends to be messy
and ongoing work, tracking as it does
alongside life. It’s not finite, so maybe
there is something inherently alien to
writers about “finished” products. The
book is done, bound, closed—I can’t
pry it back open and recover its secrets.
I put them in there, between the cov-
er s, so t he y wou ld be sa fe i n t here, per-
haps even from me.
Here’s what I can remember: Writ-
ing it felt like one, long arduous lift. At
no point did I encounter that sensation
novelists have reported feeling: I have
wandered into a field. The path behind me
has disappeared, and so has the path ahead
of me. Why did I do this, exactly?
No, writing Once More We Saw
Stars was purposeful. I saw the end
goal even from the very beginning,
and it only grew more shining and
clear the more impossible it seemed.
My son was growing inside of my wife,
preparing to enter this world that I
felt had broken me so savagely. How
would I not be broken, now, for him?
This was an emergency situation, and
in such situations we summon what-
ever resources we have—ones that we
know about and ones that we don’t.There were a few things I knew. I
had to write a bearable book. The ex-
perience of losing Greta, of learning
to live without her, might have been
unbearable, but I was asking read-
ers to bear it, and thus I needed to
lead them—gently, respectfully. If I
stood in front of all of this carnage,
wailing—who wouldn’t be blamed for
turning away, with a shudder? The
world has enough brutality, and most
people’s lives already contain more
tragedy than they can handle.
I f I needed to tel l t hem t hat I wa nted
every day to die and wanted it badly
like you might want water; if I recount
how we went to the medical examiner’s
office to identify her little body—if I
was truly asking people to witness such
horrors, what was it that I was giving
them in return? I decided the answer
had to be a calmness, a steadiness. The
book would have to be burned clear of
self-pity until not a whiff remained. I
could write about self-pity, of course—
no account of grieving is true without
it—but it had to always occur in the
past. For the book to work, for it to
provide solace or testimony to any-
thing more enduring than my own
private pain, I needed to be something
other than the subject of my memoir. I
had to be a window.
So I stood back from my own pain
and, in the telling, learned what there
was to discard and what there was to
keep. In this, my wife, Stacy, was my
best editor. “No one cares about this,”
she would tell me—gently, somehow—
as I edited and honed the book. What’s
the old maxim?
“Let come what
comes; let go what
goes. Study what
remains.” Now
that it lives its
own majestically
alien life outside
of my mind, Once
More We Saw Stars
is an account of
everything that
remained.SEPT OCT 2019 64NONFICTION 2019JAYSON
GREENE
Once More We Saw Stars (Knopf,
May), a debut memoir exploring the
fifteen months between the acci-
dental death of the author’s two-
year-old daughter and the birth of
his son; a meditation on the univer-
sal truths of how we find meaning,
beauty, and spiritual renewal in the
wake of unimaginable grief. Agent:
Anna Sproul-Latimer. Editor: Jordan
Pavlin. First lines: “How should we
start, sweetie? Maybe with one of
the silly games we invented together.
They meant nothing to anyone else,
but everything to us. There was the
time we pretended, for half an hour,
that the ramp outside of a building
was an elevator. You would press
your finger to a brick; I would make
a beeping noise. I would say, ‘Going
down!’ and you would run down the
ramp, laughing. That was the whole
game. It was enough.” gr
eene:^ joni^ greene;^books:^david^hamsley