Staff reader Meera Vijayann speaks with NER author Jane Bernstein about public tragedies, the myth of closure, and her essay “I’m Thinking About My Sister, Fifty-Eight Years After She Was Murdered” from issue 46.1.
Meera Vijayann: Your essay begins with the stunning line: “Laura, beloved sister, murdered fifty-eight years ago, stabbed to death by a stranger at dusk, while chaining up her bicycle.” This could be anything: an epitaph, the start of a poem, or a startling moment of clarity. It lays the foundation for how you navigate the circular highs and lows of grief in the narrative, especially because this is a moment that you relive over and over again when you read the news, or as you worked on your novel and memoir. What was your process in writing this piece?
Jane Bernstein: I think it started with an episode of gun violence, I don’t remember which, only that reading the story and seeing the photos in the newspaper just devastated me. It hurts that nothing has been done to stop people from owning firearms, but it was also the sameness of the response, which felt a like a chorus of a song we keep singing over and over again. We read about the event and the flowers and prayers, the community gathers around the bereaved, and then that’s it. We’ve moved on. It’s very distressing, because I’m aware that for those left behind, the grieving hasn’t even begun. I’m a pretty functional person, not someone who wears any of my history. It’s not like I hide my past, but after all these years, my sister’s murder is very deep inside me, something unseen. So, I wanted to try and say something about my particular response to the chorus around public tragedies, and the way my own vulnerabilities make me sensitive to the families left behind and their stories, which are rarely told.
I’d always wanted to be a writer even before my sister was murdered. Her loss was something I tried to write about for a long period of time. After I’d published a novel, and then a memoir about my daughter, I told my agent that I wanted to write a nonfiction book about my sister’s murder, and she said, “No one is interested in a murder that happened 30 years ago.” The yearning to write about Laura persisted, but when I finally started writing the manuscript that became Bereft, I only wanted to write about my sister. It took me years to realize that the book was really about those who were left behind, that it was more about the repercussions of Laura’s murder, rather than my sister. It’s a strange thing, but some of us who write memoirs resist being at the center of the story. I wanted to leave myself out of the narrative. It was only when I relented that I was able to write the fuller story of what became Bereft.
MV: In the essay, you observe how the silence that follows death changes entire generations of families and people. Your relationship with your mother falls apart after Laura’s death and there is a finality to it. You write: “I did not know what exactly I feared, only that I could not transcend it, though I yearned for us to face each other in grief and love.” Tell us a bit about the fears of “never quite knowing” when processing difficult memories.
JB: One of the really heartbreaking problems I had with my mother is that she was shaped by her family and her generation, and by her own individual psychology. She didn’t have the language that I had, or the relentless need I had to untangle what I did not understand, to work through what troubled me and talk about what hurt. I was silent after Laura’s murder because I lived in my parents’ house. But when I was on my own and finally able to acknowledge my sister and the depth of my loss, I wanted something from my mother, too. We just couldn’t go there, at all. Any conversation about feelings or emotions just enraged her. So, it took me a long time to step back from our mostly silent war. What made it harder was the constant awareness that I was a disappointment being the only one left. A lot of times it seems as if the favorite child is the one who dies. In my case, I was the favorite one, and I was a letdown, argumentative, difficult, particularly because there was no language, no way of reaching my mother. My mother has been long dead, but when I think about her, it’s always with incredible sadness because I wish we could’ve reached each other over this shared grief, but we never could.
My former husband’s mother used to say something like, “Least mentioned, quickest mended.” I don’t remember the exact words, but the gist of it was another version of my mother’s: “We will not talk about this.” But for someone like me, the shadow, the unspoken, is always there.
MV: There is a sense that there is no real closure—that no matter what one does, when the life of someone you love is cut short in a horrifying way, you cannot find a way towards the end, whatever that end may be. You try to approach this by considering what might have been if you were able to give a statement in court seven years after her death, if your parents had talked openly, or if your family had exacted vengeance. Stories often require a beginning and an end. What would be your advice to someone writing about grief?
JB: Years ago, Nancy Mairs wrote that grief is not monolithic in an opinion piece for The New York Times. I think that’s the key in writing about grief and also in understanding it. Understanding, for me, also meant pushing back against this idea of closure. My life went on after Laura’s murder—I got married, had kids, and a career—so it wasn’t like I was walking around with my guts hanging out. When I think about the years after losing Laura, I think that I accommodated to her death and learned to live with my wounds, rather than having achieved closure. Even the healthiest person has vulnerabilities after such an event, whereas, at least to me, closure suggests you’ve been stitched up and now are as good as new. To write about grief and its aftermath you need to get close to the individual moments in a person’s life, rather than depicting a monolithic overview. There aren’t any neat stages, either. Every person grieves and heals in a different way, with a different timeline. On the long road to some kind of accommodation, there’s wrenching sorrow, but also distractions and laughter and whatever makes up the complexity of a person’s life.
MV: Who are your biggest influences?
JB: I love Nancy Mairs’s essays. They are so clearheaded and never try to wring emotion out of a reader. I also love the work of my mentor, Lore Segal, who died in October at 96. She had a unique ability to write about the most profound disasters with a cool, ironic, utterly unique tone. Her narrative voice was as distinct as Joan Didion’s or Hemingway’s. Cheryl Strayed’s essays about her unraveling after the death of her mother affected me deeply. I love Jamaica Kincaid’s fiction; her anger spills onto the page and somehow never repels—her work manages to remain rich and engaging.
MV: What are you reading at the moment?
JB: My students’ work takes much of my attention, but I managed to sneak in Carolyn Kuebler’s Liquid, Fragile, Perishable, which I loved, and The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. Now that summer approaches, I can dig into the giant stack of books on my night table.
Jane Bernstein has written six books. She is a lapsed screenwriter and an essayist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and journals such as Creative Nonfiction, The Sun, and Crazyhorse. Her essay “Still Running” was chosen for Best American Sports Writing 2018. Gina from Siberia (Animal Media, 2018), a children’s book co-written with her daughter, was translated into Russian and German. Her grants include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Creative Writing and a Fulbright Fellowship. She is a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University and honored to be in the New England Review. Visit www.janebernstein.net to read some of her shorter work.
Meera Vijayann, a nonfiction reader for NER, is an essayist and writer based in Seattle, Washington. She is currently working on her debut novel.