Danielle Ariano’s forthcoming memoir, The Requirement of Grief, is a meditation on the complexities of the sister bond and the grief that comes when that bond is broken by a sibling’s suicide. Ariano received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Baltimore. As part of her thesis, she wrote, designed and published her first book, Getting Over the Rainbow, a memoir recounting her humorous and sometimes painful experiences coming out as a lesbian. Ariano’s work has been published in Salon, Huff Post, Baltimore City Paper, Baltimore Fishbowl, North Dakota Quarterly, Cobalt Review, and Welter. She is a former columnist for Baltimore Gay Life, and she has been featured on WYPR’s radio show, The Signal.
Jen Michalski: Congratulations on The Requirement of Grief. This was such an intense read. Can you tell us about the journey that led you to Atmosphere Press? How has the experience been?
Danielle Ariano: Oh, the journey… I knew I wanted to publish with a small press. For my first book, Getting Over the Rainbow, I went the route of querying agents for months without any luck. Eventually, I found an interested press, signed a contract with them, and then they folded. All of this took so much energy and time. I found it to be very mentally and creatively depleting.
This time around I skipped the agent queries and looked for small presses that seemed (1) established enough that they would not disappear and (2) published beautiful books. I thought that this would be less mentally taxing, but it really wasn’t. I sent my manuscript out for about a year and a half. Each press has their own application process. One of the presses required me to submit an entire marketing plan along with my manuscript.
Atmosphere is a hybrid press. Initially I was very skeptical when they offered me a contract because I had heard bad things about some hybrid presses, but after spending time connecting with some of their authors and hearing about their experiences, I signed. They have been wonderful. Top notch at every turn: editing, cover design, interior design, and pr. They have an amazing team and they really care about what they do.
JM: That’s great to hear! Signing with any press can be stressful, particularly since you don’t really know what their process is like until after you sign with them. I think there’s also a reticence to speak out about bad experiences with presses, because the writers’ community is small, and you don’t want to burn bridges. It’s a difficult topic, for sure.
Speaking of difficult topics, dealing with a sibling who’s living with mental illness and then taking their own life is so heartbreaking. I kind of dreaded picking up your memoir every evening, but I found I couldn’t put it down when I did. Not only was the prose so lovely, but I found your own self-reflection so grounded. It’s not always a given that the author of a memoir has the emotional maturity to tackle the complexities of their experiences, and I was surprised and heartened by how in touch you were with yourself. I also thought the arrangement of the book was very effective: can you talk about how you decided to braid the book in this way?
DA: I was very conscious of the heaviness of my subject as I wrote this memoir. As a reader, I’ve had the experience of starting a memoir and being unable to finish because both the topic and the voice are too depressing, so I’m relieved to hear that you couldn’t put it down. Phew. I really thought about my readers as I revised. Difficult subjects require moments of levity so that the reader doesn’t feel suffocated by sadness and I looked for ways to add those both in content and tone.
As for the structure, it took a long time to come to it. When I write it’s always a mess, with everything smooshed into one document with very little organization. I write scenes and then figure out how they will go together. The longer the thing I’m writing, the more unwieldy it becomes. As I worked through, it became clear that there were two competing narratives. The first was the story of my sister Alexis’ death and the process of learning to live with it. This narrative drove the action of the book and I felt it needed to be told chronologically. Then there was the story of my relationship with Alexis and how it changed over time. I think this is what makes a reader care about the other narrative, but these chapters did not necessarily need to be in chronological order. I wanted the reader to know, early on, both the beauty and horror that could accompany our interactions. At a certain point it just became clear that going back and forth between these two would be a good way to tell the story.
JM: I thought it was very effective. I remember Marion Winik (who I noticed had read a version of the manuscript) once said that there will always be someone about whom you’re writing who will disagree with your recollection of an event or how they acted in it. How did you approach sharing chapters with say, your mom or dad or Lindsay, your partner, or friends in which they were featured? Did they have any input in how they were portrayed? Conversely, were there any recollections that you’d gotten wrong and were able to correct with the help of someone else’s recall of the event?
DA: When it got far enough along, I asked my parents to read the whole manuscript. This is such a personal and sensitive subject. I wanted to make sure they didn’t dispute any of my recollections, but mostly I wanted them to have a chance to voice their thoughts/concerns about anything I’d chosen to write about.
Losing a child at any age is the worst thing that could happen to a person, in my opinion. If I were them, I’m not sure I would have had the strength to read the manuscript, but they did. They even found a way to tell me they were proud of me, which is remarkable.
My mom gave me the manuscript back to me with written notes and after avoiding it for a few months, we scheduled a call where we talked through each comment. The conversation lasted a couple of hours, and was both difficult and healing for us.
For each concern she raised, I considered whether the detail was integral to the story. If it wasn’t, I cut it. If it was, I explained why I felt it needed to stay. Ultimately, my relationship with my mom is more important than this book, so I erred on the side of cutting things.
My mom also helped to correct details about her brother’s death. I thought he had been stabbed and died immediately, but he actually made it to the hospital and died there.
JM: I remember when my mom died, I kept a journal with all the events leading to her death and immediately after it. I never planned to do anything with it publishing-wise—I just knew that if I didn’t record the events, some of them would be inevitably lost, and even now, when I look through those notes, I’m amazed at how much I’ve forgotten. I feel like the point of memoir is, in some ways, not to analyze but simply to record an event, to preserve facts that will withstand differing interpretations and limits of recall. And yet, our natural course as humans is *to* forget. It’s a strange dichotomy. To me, maybe memoir is a way to purge those memories and store them in a safe place so that one may go about one’s life and not continue to ruminate—so one may forget. What is the purpose of memoir for you?
DA: For me, all creative writing is about sharing stories in an attempt to understand experiences that we might not have the chance to live. I’m not a religious person, but if I had to join a church, one of the central tenets would have to be a belief in the power of storytelling because I feel that stories can change people’s lives/minds/thinking in a way that few other things can.
I do think that writing a memoir is a cathartic act, as you say, perhaps even one that purges memories in a sense, but for me that’s more of a side effect of the act of writing memoir, a bonus maybe, but it can’t be the sole purpose. If it is, you’re keeping a journal, not writing a memoir.
Memoir is for an audience. A memoirist has to consider their audience at every turn, and has to understand that the people inside the story become characters that need to be developed in much the same way as in a novel. Of course, you can’t stray from the truth in a memoir, can’t invent interesting backstories, but if the characters feel flat to a reader, why would they go along on what is often a painful journey? Interestingly, one big focus of my last round of edits was putting more of myself into the book, because my editor felt that my “character” was not fully developed.
JM: There’s a quote in Joan Didion’s memoir of grieving, The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she says, “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.” You’re very honest that your relationship with your sister was fraught as adults, and that you were mostly estranged. Can you speak to this quote and what it means to you and your relationship with Alexis?
DA: In many ways, I began grieving the loss of my sister years before she died, which made the grief that came after her death feel both complicated and somehow familiar.
Immediately after Alexis died, I felt that I’d failed to love her while she was alive and I carried a great deal of guilt about this. Sometimes, it felt like that guilt might wash me away if it weren’t for the very vivid memories of my sister at her worst, the times she was the most difficult to love. I clung to these bad memories like a life preserver.
Often when a person dies, they become canonized, especially by family members. Sometimes it feels like a sacrilege to remember the actual whole, complicated person they were—the bad and the good—but I felt that if I didn’t remember all of Alexis, I would never be able to forgive myself for the ways I failed to love her.
This May will mark 8 years since my sister ended her life. I’m not a believer in the adage about time healing all wounds, but I do believe there’s a relationship between the two. Time has changed the way I relate to my grief, my guilt, and my memories. I am able to hold Alexis close to me in a way that was not possible right after she died. I’m not entirely sure that this answers the question, but it’s all I’ve got.
JM: Were there any other books that served as inspiration or guidebooks while you were working on Requirement?
DA: Joan Wickersham’s, The Suicide Index, Marion Winik’s, First Comes Love, and Lucas Mann’s Lord Fear.
JM: What are you working on now?
DA: Well, mostly I’ve been working on trying to get the word out about this book, which I appreciate your help with! Your questions have been fantastic. I’ve found that I needed to shut off my writer brain while I’ve been in this very foreign PR mode. All that to say, that between being a wife and mom and working full time, I haven’t been writing much at all. I’m hoping that changes very soon. I’ll be going back to the book I started at the beginning of Covid, which will be centered around motherhood with a slight focus on being a lesbian mother in a same sex marriage. So far, I’ve got a bunch of disconnected essays that will eventually find their way to an organized book, but for now it’s just a big mess.
Jen Michalski is the author of the novels All This Can Be True (forthcoming from Turner/Key Light), The Tide King and Summer She Was Under Water (both Black Lawrence Press), and You’ll Be Fine (NineStar Press), a couplet of novellas titled Could You Be With Her Now (Dzanc Books), and three collections of fiction. She’s also the editor in chief of jmww.
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