Review: Without Her

Grief Requires A Journey into the Taboo
Review: Without Her

Stephen Harrison
Rebecca Spiegel
Memoir
Milkweed Editions, pp.246
Cost: $18.00 (paperback)

Rebecca Spiegel's debut memoir Without Her is subtitled "A Chronicle of Grief and Love," and you feel both in impressive measure. Throughout the book, Spiegel pieces together the events leading up to and following her sister Emily’s decision to take her own life. Grief and love are vulnerable fields to till when someone is disclosing to an audience. However two perhaps even more powerful and more vulnerable themes run through Spiegel's work: regret and blame.

Unspoken emotions can weigh the heaviest when working through a tragedy because they aren’t the emotions that we’re supposed to feel: inconsolable sadness, heartwarming memories of the person who’s been lost, an appeal to the senselessness of it all. These are the societally prescribed ways that we should talk about our lost loved ones. What makes Spiegel's narrative unique is how she comes to terms with the emotions that have no useful manual for traversing this kind of loss: How could Emily do this to herself? What if I had done something differently? What if I’d done something differently my whole life? What if I had something to do with Emily’s death? How can I ever be at peace if I never know the answers to these questions?

Spiegel's courage to open up to her readers and bring them along in her journey makes for both a compelling read and an impressive examination of the kind of difficult questions that need to be confronted to heal.

Written with extensive anecdotal recollections from family and friends of Emily and Rebecca alike, the ultimate destination is known from the beginning. But the procession of events leading up to Emily’s death and the devastating aftereffects are like the grieving process itself; it doesn’t follow the kind of tidy linear narrative we oftentimes take comfort in. Spiegel speaks to this directly: “I was once taught that in Eastern writing it is common for stories to move in spirals while western academics like straight, narrow lines. I can admit that there is a refuge in the tragic; a freedom from the expectation of a clean, continuous narrative” (165). It is in this refuge that family dynamics, pivotal moments, and pure coincidences are sifted through and made sense of without the need to connect the dots so perfectly.

We get to know Emily bit by bit as the story is read both through anecdotes and supplementary materials. Emily was an artist. Rebecca and Emily were very close. Emily had bipolar disorder. Scanned diary entries, images of Emily’s artwork, and text logs between Rebecca and Emily bring both the person and the relationship into focus. Including these materials makes the devastation feel even closer because we get to know Emily as more than just a collection of quotes and stories from other people’s memories. The memories come directly from Emily herself. This also introduces the reader to some of the most pressing questions that a grief stricken mind can only approach carefully: Is it right to be angry at Emily? Is it fair to say Emily chose to kill herself when she was struggling with bipolar disorder? What tiny event or conversation could have gone differently and changed the outcome? Are other people implicated in her death? Am I implicated in her death?

Addressing her late sister, Spiegel writes, “I drank to your departure because your depressed visit had been so draining. Four days later, you were dead” (136). Such a revelation is a truth that feels like it sucks all the air out of the room. It addresses the reality that Emily did feel like a burden, and sometimes it was a relief when she was gone, even before she was gone. It is an admission that is sad and guilty and encapsulates fully the regret and blame, but it is one of the taboos about death and suicide that needs to be broken so Rebecca can truly heal.

Spiegel's memoir will feel familiar to anyone who has worked through grief but it is her willingness to allow us to accompany her through the most difficult questions—the questions and thoughts we’re not supposed to have after a tragedy like suicide—that will keep you glued to the page as her process unfolds. There is a comfort in the universal question that can never be answered but you cannot avoid: “What Emily was thinking, I will never know” (243).

Without Her is a process of reconciliation to the fact that the objective truth will never be known. It succeeds in making you feel less alone if you also carry that uncertainty with you, and convinces you that you can continue moving forward in spite of that weight.