I have known grief in many forms. We all have. Most often, we recognise it in those who mourn those passed, but grief is a far more insidious creature than we care to admit. It comes not only for the lost, but for the living—for the body that no longer moves as it once did; for the friend who still draws breath, yet is no longer yours; for the life that shimmers on the horizon, always just out of reach.
Grief wears many faces. More than I could ever hope to name.
It came to me on a Thursday in February. That morning, I learnt that a dear friend had died. That afternoon, my chronic illness was declared “treatment resistant.” I lost someone I loved, and in the very same breath I lost the last thread of hope I had been clinging to for myself.
Some months earlier, I had read Pandora by Anne Rice. I adored her. She was a strange and stormy creature, all emotion and intellect. She was unlike any vampire I had encountered before. And that night, in my grief, I believe something of Pandora returned to me. Not quite herself, but some echo of her braided with my grief.
It sounds absurd, almost Stephanie Meyer-esque, yet there was no meadow, no brooding romance in the violets between Edward and Bella. There was only Mariota. She appeared beside a window, cloaked in candlelight, soaked through in a twelfth century chemise. Her black hair clung to her cheeks, and her eyes met mine through the dark.
Of course, I did not yet know her name and truthfully I’m not certain she was looking at me at all. I’ve always had vivid dreams and nightmares, but this felt different. Perhaps it was my friend saying goodbye. Perhaps it was grief itself taking shape.
She gazed for some time, then without a word she rose, opened the wooden door of her stone dwelling, and walked straight past me. She was utterly drenched. Not wet, but sopping.
I followed her (or whatever version of myself existed within that dream) down a soft, grassy bank and into the black water of a lake. She never faltered. She kept walking. Her head slipped beneath the surface…and then I woke.
“Well, that’s certainly one for therapy!” I thought. But as the day wore on, as I messaged mutual friends about the one we’d lost, as I sat blank eyed before my computer screen, I could not stop thinking of her. This strange, sodden woman in the window.
I turned to Pinterest and began to gather reference images. I wrote poems, short stories, trying to understand who she might be. And then, as though possessed, the story began to take shape. It felt as if Mariota herself slipped into my body and took hold of my hands.
I wrote for hours each day—no fewer than eight—often reaching ten thousand words or more. The words poured out of me with relentless clarity. I had never experienced a story come to me so freely. I was accustomed to hitting walls, to writer’s block, to cycles of brainstorming and false starts, but Mariota flowed through me in the most exhilarating, most obsessive way.
I often find my characters or the voice of a book through research. Sometimes it’s a painting, or a Magic: The Gathering card, or a song that won’t leave me alone. But Mariota was different. She felt less like a character discovered and more like a creature like some half dreamt beast who crawled out from the dark and took the reins herself.
Because Mariota was born of grief, she could never be simple.
She is a woman burdened by time and memory. I did not write her to make sense of my pain but she definitely understood it, perhaps more than I did. In giving her form, I gave my grief one too.
In writing her, I also found a way to speak of things I had no language for—about my chronic pain and disability, about faith undone, about the ache of watching the world move on without you. I could put it all in her hands. Her devotion. Her ruin. Her rage. Grief had marked me as its scribe and Mariota had answered the call.
And so I kept writing. Through the pain, through the sleepless nights, through the stretches of time where I was not sure I could go on. I wrote through the wound. Not to heal it but because the wound was where the story lived.
We don’t talk often enough about the kind of writing that hurts. The kind that wrings you out. That leaves you sleepless and wondering why you ever chose to put your pain into words in the first place. Writing, at its most honest, often demands far more than it gives back…at least at first.
But it’s also where the real work happens.
In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes that “the act of telling one’s story is itself a step towards recovery.” Writing doesn’t need to be shared with the world to be healing, but it can be! It can name what was once unspeakable. It can map the geography of a body in pain, or give form to emotions that don’t otherwise fit in conversation.
“The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.”
—The Writing Life, Annie Dillard
For me, Mariota was giving. Letting go. An act of stitching together all the things that had unravelled inside me.
It wasn’t beautiful, not while I was writing it. It was obsessive and exhausting. But I believe that these are the stories that need telling most. As Ocean Vuong puts it: “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.” And I’d say the same of pain. If we don’t write it, we risk losing the aliveness underneath the ache!
Mariota is the book that changed my life. Not because it led to agent offers, or because others called it beautiful. But because it reminded me I was still here. Still feeling.
And that’s what I hope for anyone who reads it with a wound of their own.
Thanks for listening to me blab.
