The Literary Agent Who Lost the Narrative Thread

As a literary agent, I’ve spent years shaping the stories of other people’s grief. There was the Pulitzer-nominated journalist who’d lost her only child when he was seven. And the Black descendent of Thomas Jefferson who, upon her father’s death, finally took the stories of his lineage seriously. Then there was the New York Times bestselling author who cared for young animals only to have to euthanize them when the time came.

Over the years, I’d built a business around refining narratives of heartbreak to reveal stories of earned strength. Yet, in the midst of my own grief story, I was cracking.

Literally.

It was months after my mother’s senseless death in a car accident, and I was at the dentist again. A part of me felt like Veda Sultenfuss from My Girl, with that invisible chicken bone down her throat. But I was sure: my tooth was cracking.

The book was replete with metaphors about the healing power of nature and the way that plants adapt to change due to the natural cycles of life and death.

The dentist was skeptical at first, but soon after “taking a look,” admitted that my molar had indeed cracked down to the gumline. He’d seal it, and we’d hope the bonding held.

“How long will it last?” I asked.

“Maybe months. Maybe forever,” the dentist said. “We cannot know.”

This felt too on the nose, like a metaphor I’d have edited out of someone else’s book.

I earned my publishing stripes representing heavy-hitting works of narrative nonfiction—the kinds of books that went on to be New York Times Editors’ Picks and that were nominated for prestigious awards. Only now, every time I tried to read nonfiction, I felt sick.

Each time I opened another book proposal, intent on doing what I’d always done—using the skills I’d acquired as a PhD student in Logic and Philosophy of Science to interrogate the core argument—the words on the page blurred together. Those big ideas, which had once helped me make sense of life’s complexity, allowing me to reframe my own story into one of triumph, now felt irrelevant, like I’d opened a book written in a language that had no frame of reference in my world.

I needed to get back to doing my job. I needed my teeth to stop breaking. I needed to find my footing. But what I really needed, I decided, was what I’d provided so many of my authors: a narrative to reframe loss into something that made sense.

I took over a month off from work. I spent time with my husband and my two young kids, and I wrote.

I wrote sad essays, which never found their narrative thrust. I wrote letters to my mom, which stumbled through bouts of melancholy before I finally admitted there was no plot. I wrote emails I never sent and emails I did send, but no line I ever cast managed to reel in anything healing.

So I decided to write something different, a book unlike anything that, at that time, I would have represented. I wrote fantasy.

The book was replete with metaphors about the healing power of nature and the way that plants adapt to change due to the natural cycles of life and death. It was a perfectly contained story, with every narrative thread tied up in a neat bow, showing how one could use grief as a portal to access true strength.

At long last, I’d created a narrative that oriented me within my own story.

“Have you thought about therapy?” the doctor asked gently.

I was overcome with relief. With those two simple words, this chapter of my life was finally over:

THE END

A few months later, I went back to the dentist for my bi-annual check. The hygienist told me there were hairline fractures along the tops of my teeth. My teeth also showed signs of excessive wear. He told me to wear my mouthguard not only at night but when I was exercising, too. “And please,” he said. “Find a way to manage your stress.”

I left the office appalled. I’d exorcised my grief through narrative. I’d used that story to rise above the pain. Didn’t this man know that I was officially healed?

A few months later, I went to the doctor’s for my annual physical. My blood pressure was so high that the nurse had to measure it twice. That was common, she said. It happened to lots of people. I didn’t tell her that it didn’t usually happen to me.

The doctor, a kindly man I’d always tried to impress by saying things like I often work with physicians on their books, asked how I was doing. I told him how I’d lost the last bit of weight I’d been carrying since my baby.

He congratulated me as he typed into his wall-mounted computer. “Any changes to your medical history?”

It was then, with that simple but brutal question, that I started to cry.

Over the span of a few heartbeats, tears swelled my throat, making it difficult to speak.

Once I got my bearings, I explained that I was only crying because I hadn’t been sleeping well. I hadn’t been sleeping well because my mom had died six months earlier. It was a car crash that wasn’t her fault. Did that count as a change in my medical history? Probably not. But it was worth mentioning, right?

“Have you thought about therapy?” the doctor asked gently.

I told him I didn’t like therapy. I rattled off reasons why it didn’t work for me. He handed me scratchy paper towels and explained why it might be worth a try.

Begrudgingly, I left his office under the care of an automated service that matched me up with a provider and a promise that he’d follow up to see how I was.

I began to identify with the discomfort of the moment instead of crafting a story to contextualize my grief so I could snap out of it and be somewhere else.

When I met Quatasia a few weeks later, the first thing I said to her was that I didn’t want to be there. She said something validating and then asked questions in order to get to know me. I tried to impress her with all the things I normally say when I’m feeling insecure—about growing up on reduced-fare lunches and how I started college at 15, about getting into a PhD program and then becoming a literary agent and also an author. Then she said words I’ll never forget.

“So what I’m hearing is—and I could be wrong about this—that you make up stories so you don’t have to feel your own emotions. Is that right?”

I felt her words like an air bubble in my chest, so uncomfortable that I was struck with hysterical laughter.

At the end of the session, Quatasia asked: Did I want to make an appointment for next week?

Over the next six months of therapy, as I told and re-told the story of my life, as I complained about therapists treating humans as metaphors, and talked endlessly about the perils of religion because Quatasia had once mentioned Jesus and I wanted to see if my atheism would make her reject me—I slowly began to lower my shields. I began to name my emotions instead of just intellectualizing them. I began to identify with the discomfort of the moment instead of crafting a story to contextualize my grief so I could snap out of it and be somewhere else.

Slowly, week by week, I began undoing the vast narrative structures I’d erected in order to avoid vulnerability. In doing so, I started to realize that, contrary to what I’d always believed, my life is not actually a narrative. I am not supposed to show an arc of growth and change over time in order for my life and my experiences to have meaning.

I don’t confuse the way that I communicate my story with the story itself.

The point of creating a story is not to supplant a person’s experiences but supplement them. Stories are just another way of looking sideways at a thing that can have no satisfiable deconstruction. Even if I might have survived a great many horrible things through the clever use of narrative—and in fact had turned my ability to do so into a career—the ability to transform heartbreak into redemption can be maladaptive if it means I cannot be in the moment with my own pain.

I still grind my teeth. There are some days I still have a hard time wanting to eat. Likewise, there are still nights when I struggle to sleep because my mom should be living and she isn’t and it is hard, sitting with the rock-heavy truth of that.

Someday I might have a new perspective. Someday I might reframe this whole period of life depending on what I need to glean in that moment. Someday my story might change.

Every day I keep sitting with the tension of an unresolved narrative is a day I might resurface another memory of my mom. The dynamism of that remembering is what will keep my mom alive in me, like a second pulse, which, more than a clean resolution, is exactly what I’ve been aching for all along—even if I didn’t always know it.

Because here’s the thing about turning unruly experiences into fixed stories: it doesn’t always give us room to change how we see the events of our lives—nor how we see the ones we love.

I’m back at work now, slinging books with nearly the same gusto as before my mom died, teasing out complex human experiences into stories that others can comprehend. But I no longer allow the books I agent nor the ones I write to substitute for being in the moment with my real life. I don’t confuse the way that I communicate my story with the story itself.

I let my own narrative be messy.

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Siren Says by Jennifer Michelle Herrera is available from Putnam.