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Grief is an intensifier. It doesn’t often – despite what films and television would have you believe – cause you to act massively out of character. Like motherhood or any other huge life upheaval, its actual effect is to strip away the nonsense and leave your essential nature, your core, not just intact but now unobscured by everyday concerns and frivolities.
So it was no real surprise to find myself, in the immediate weeks after the death of my beloved dad in 2023, flinging myself into books. I would have done so literally, if I could. I wanted to gather my physical books into a wall – or better yet, a cave – around me that would both protect me from this new reality and let me cry in peace within it. Failing that, I took mental refuge in them instead.
I read like I had never read before. I read like a chain smoker smokes, turning the last page of one book and immediately opening up the cover of another. I had books lined up before me to make sure I didn’t go a moment without. None of my usual leisurely picking and choosing, reading blurbs and reviews, feeling my way into what would best suit my mood. Because my mood was simple, uniform and deeply miserable, and what I needed was new stories and characters ceaselessly streaming into my cortex and banishing, for as many seconds at a time as they could, the fact that outside those pages the unforgiving real world no longer had the gentle, wry, witty form of my dad in it.
Every moment that I was not inescapably occupied (with work, with Mum, with making sure life carried on as normally as possible for my son), I was reading. And when I was vitally occupied, I was longing to read, burning to in a way I hadn’t properly felt since I was a child. It felt so odd to have arrived at the same place via sorrow, rather than joy. Adulthood sure can be the pits sometimes.
Anyway it was all odd, and difficult, and my heart goes out to people grieving harder and more complicated losses than that of an elderly father who went peacefully, and on his own terms, when it was absolutely time to go.
The retreat from the world didn’t last as long as I had expected. I felt at first like I would be floored for ever. But now – and I’m writing this six months later – I spend a lot of the time feeling bad that I don’t feel worse in the absence of this man whom I, quietly but unreservedly, loved so much, who knew me so well and who loved me, even more quietly but just as unreservedly, right back. But it’s because I still feel him with me – which, as someone with no religious faith and no goddamn spiritual side either, I really did not expect. But he’s there. Or it’s there; or something’s there anyway. I do really feel, as the poem has it, that he has only gone into the next room. Mum says it’s because we are so much alike. This evolution of the exasperated cry “You’re exactly like your father!”, when she found me next to some set chore abandoned because I’d been distracted by a book, which pursued me throughout my childhood, both charms and aggrieves me. But I hold on to the idea that it’s true.
And I have discovered romance. Not in real life, obviously. Yuck. But the genre, once forsworn, is now very necessary to me. Once I stopped feeling quite like I would be floored for ever, I started being drawn towards books with light, bright covers that promised distraction, an uplift and – above all – a happy ending. I realise this is not a psychologically complex phenomenon. But however obvious the route, the comfort they offered was real and wonderful. Especially as the first three I came across – Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, Stephanie Butland’s Lost for Words and Harriet Evans’s Happily Ever After – were all about the world of books, bookworms and bookshops, and formed the perfect bridge to cross into this new, unexplored region.
There also seemed to have been, in the 20-odd years since I had last surveyed the landscape, a move away from the ditsy/hot-mess heroines that sprang up post-Bridget Jones. The new generation of protagonists all had their problems – particularly Loveday Cardew, whose emotional withdrawal after her repeated battering by life is carefully and compassionately depicted by Butland and further explored, with great consistency and credibility, in the sequel Found in a Bookshop – but they weren’t chaotic collections of neediness and neuroses held together by the offices of devoted friends, who in real life would have been well within their rights to have deleted these succubi from their phones years ago. They were properly funny, properly thoughtful, capable – often even maintaining professional standards day in, day out at the office! – and generally life-affirming, rather than life-depleting, people to hang out with. I felt like introducing them to some of the longsuffering best friends in earlier books. “Look, this is what you deserve! Enjoy!”
It was a reminder – though I do try to stay aware of it anyway – never to write off any field, any genre, for ever, for the simple reason that even if it doesn’t evolve (and sometimes, as with the hot messes above, it does), you do. You toughen up a bit here, break down a bit there, learn this, rediscover that, have children, have cancer, move jobs, move countries, are opened up to more experiences, more possibilities, live through more world events, governments, relationships, McDonald’s menus, Kardashian exploits and iterations of the Strictly Come Dancing panel – all these things change you and change what you need, what you want and what you bring to previously discarded books, when you pick them up again.
Romantic/popular/commercial fiction, whatever you want to call it, picked me up on bad days, brushed me down and sent me off again with a loving pat to get through the next few hours, days, weeks until I collapsed back into its arms. It’s a trust fall. The writers of commercial fiction know their audience, are often part of that audience (Evans is a lifelong fan of Georgette Heyer, for example, and I suspect none has come to the job without an early affinity with the genre and an absorption of its rules, both the obvious and the ineffable, into their bones) and consider it their duty to deliver. I think of them now like a quieter, more studious version of the A-Team, except that if you have a problem, if no one else can help (or if you have soaked all the available shoulders with tears and need to give them a bit of time to dry out), you can always find them, these soldiers of romantic fortune.
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And when I need further bolstering – when, for example, I reach that stage of grief everyone passes through at some point, where it starts to feel absolutely infuriating that your loved one is still dead, when you have missed them quite enough, they have proved that their absence really is a bad thing and it really is time that they came back, because carrying on like this is too hard, really beyond a joke – I stop buying new books and look to my library shelves. Not just the children’s section, though of course that is where any number of my strongest and favourite memories of Dad reside.
But Dad is there in adult books too. Murphy’s Boy by Torey Hayden was my first ever true-life tale. I tried to buy it after seeing the film based on it (Trapped in Silence, starring Marsha Mason and a very young Kiefer Sutherland, fact-fans), about a neglected child who refused to speak or communicate via other means in the wake of his abuse and was eventually “saved” by psychologist Hayden, who specialised in the phenomenon of elective mutism. It could be seen as a forerunner of the misery memoir, but, like most forerunners of popular trends, it is much better than the thing it became. It wasn’t available in England at the time, so Dad asked one of his American friends to buy it for me and, when she handed it over next time she visited, I literally could not believe it.
There’s also Grace Metalious’s proto-bonkbuster Peyton Place, reminding me of when I was seven or eight and first heard Jeannie C Reilly sing Harper Valley PTA. I had to take the line “Well, this is just a little Peyton Place and you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites” to Dad for elucidation, and he told me all about this very famous and bestselling book, which I pledged to myself I would read as soon as I was old enough. I forgot about it until I came across a battered copy in The Brazen Head bookshop in Norfolk and pounced. It was even better than the song.
The run of Philip Roth reminds me of one of our rare disagreements. I was home for the university holiday and Dad came across me reading the newly published American Pastoral. This was just after he had read Claire Bloom’s memoir Leaving a Doll’s House, in which she details her long relationship with the volatile, controlling and verbally abusive author. Dad felt that, at the very least, I should read his books in the light of this knowledge; or, maybe, choose not to read them at all. I, at 20, felt that I could – and should – separate the man from the art.
More upliftingly, I spy Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent – a complex, gentle, yet sinuous story about a woman freed by her violent older husband’s death to start life anew. She moves to the Essex marshes to follow her long-denied interest in palaeontology and give her autistic son the peace and freedom he needs. Her scientific mind finds a strange resonance with the local rector’s attempts to stop the village community turning from God to the supernatural when it appears that the monstrous folkloric serpent has returned to the marshes. I read it, loved it and passed it to Dad. It’s a book about all the different forms of love there can be, and how they enrich a life in different ways. When he returned it, he said he had thought it as wonderful as I did. I told him that some reviewers – perhaps because you don’t at any point actually get a scene in which a giant sea monster rises out of the waters and lays waste to a village – had dismissed it as a bit of a book about nothing. “But,” he said, frowning, “it’s about everything.” And that is why I loved him, and that is how he enriched my life too.
