Writing About Death: A Conversation with Sue William Silverman
content warning: sexual abuse, assault, and rape
Sue William Silverman’s latest book, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, isn’t as grim as the title makes it seem. In fact, it’s sarcastic throughout and downright funny in many places. Whether Silverman is obsessing over serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer or panicking about a potential disease she might have picked up in a back-alley ear piercing shop, she explores her hypochondriac self with originality and a good sense of humor.
The tone is far different from Silverman’s first memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, which tells about fourteen years of sexual abuse by her father. Her next book, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey Through Sexual Addiction, recalled twenty-eight days in a rehab program for sex addiction and eating disorders.
The subjects of the thirty essays in Silverman’s new collection span the course of her life. But a fair number focus on her teenage years as Miss Route 17, cruising up and down New Jersey’s state highway in a gold Plymouth Savoy, looking for action, adventure, and escape.
By phone, I talked with Silverman about how she wrote these essays, as well as how she’s surviving during this pandemic.
Debbie Hagan: Your new book, about avoiding death, was released almost simultaneously with the outbreak of COVID-19. How has the pandemic affected you?
Sue William Silverman: I have been preparing for a pandemic since about second grade. Part of this book is about being a hypochondriac. It’s ironic. Even though I'm sitting in my house and not touching anything or being close to people, I wash my hands all the time. I'm drinking a lot of water. I taught myself how to not touch my face. I'm being precautious.
DH: Everyone worries about death and, as you describe it in the book, “it’s the great unknown.” Since you worry about death more than the average person, do you know what triggered this obsession?
SWS: It began more or less around third or fourth grade. I saw my dead grandfather lying in a coffin. There was this person who looked like my grandfather, but he was not moving. That was traumatizing. The book is also about quasi forms of death—emotional and spiritual. As a child, my father sexually molested me. As a teenager, I was sexually assaulted by a stranger. I felt as if my body had been taken away from me. That is a form of death. Physically, I was alive, but it was more an emotional or spiritual death. All this contributed to a lifelong fear of bad things happening to my body.
DH: In your essays, you’re very selective about what you leave in and what you take out, particularly in “Miss Route 17’s Near Death Experience under the Boardwalk at the New Jersey Shore.” You’re raped at knifepoint. The details are sketchy, the essay short, yet it’s emotionally powerful. How do you achieve that with such spare details?
SWS: That's a good question. A lot of it isn’t planned. A lot of writing is following a whisper going from one word to the next, getting my own ego out of the way and letting the material reveal itself. Intuitively, I wanted to convey this abruptness. You're walking along the beach one second. The next, you're not even in your body anymore. That section has a lot of very short paragraphs, some just one or two lines. I felt that if I conveyed more of what was happening around the narrator by giving just a few short details about the actual event, I could convey how I, as the narrator, felt in that actual moment. It happened really quickly. Time sort of stopped. I was there, but not there. I felt being brief was the way to go.
DH: A few of the essays deal with serious trauma, which means going back and revisiting moments that you’d probably rather forget. How do you write about events such as these without retraumatizing yourself?
SWS: I have learned to see this as an opportunity to take control over the situation. By writing it, I get to organize it. I get to figure out the impact it had on my life. Rather than being retraumatized, I know that the bad thing has already happened. If I survived that, certainly I can survive writing about it. It is an opportunity for me to better understand it. I have to write things out to make sense of them, which is key to writing about trauma. Otherwise, it just sits there in your body and your mind, and that’s more traumatizing. By writing it, I’m taking the unspoken words inside of me and giving them voice. That's very empowering.
For instance, my father molested me. I am away from him now, and I can take that experience and see it in a way that makes sense to me. When I was a kid, nothing made sense to me. Now as an adult having a voice, having words, having language, I can write it out in a way that I can incorporate it into my whole life, but in a positive way. Writing memoir is about giving your life organization. Real life is messy, but memoir is taking life and turning it into art. By doing that, we can make sense of things we do not understand. Then, there’s the whole other element of sharing your words with readers who can respond to them. When you hear from people who have read your work and have found it meaningful, that is powerful.
DH: As a writing teacher and coach, I hear people say that writing is like therapy. This makes me uneasy. I know that writing offers some kind of release and, as you say, it helps us understand and put events into perspective, but I’m not really sure it’s “therapy.” What do you think?
SWS: I don't think that turning your life into art in the form of a memoir is therapy. Therapy is incredibly messy. Like the rape scene that we just talked about. If writing were therapy, there would be blood, sweat, and tears all over the page. Therapy is where you go and sob and feel revengeful and let all of your emotions flood off you.
Art takes all that messiness and gives it form. I think writing memoir can be healing, but I don't think it is therapeutic. There is a difference. For me, it’s a way to get in touch with a wounded soul, but with an eye towards creating art. When I’m writing a really tough scene, sure I might tear up and cry. Then I just step aside, lie down, or go for a walk. We want to show our emotions on the page, but we don't want to overdo it. If I'm sobbing all over the page, there's no room for the reader to enter into the emotion. Catharsis is all about letting the reader have an emotional moment—not the author.
So, if I'm a big emotional mess all over the page, then that will push the reader away. By pulling back my emotions, by writing artfully, by organizing my material, and by writing metaphorically, the reader can enter into the experience.
DH: Even though these essays cover a big span of time, from the age four to almost the present day, you do something really clever in tying them together. You compare death to the Ultima Thule…the area on ancient maps that was “unknown territory.” Of course, death still remains the great unknown. You pull everything together by using ancient or obscure words and their definitions as headers and section dividers. How does this work in connecting these essays and how did you come up with this idea?
SWS: Actually, the essay collection started off with this mad obsession with Adam Lambert, a contestant on American Idol. Now he's the front singer for Queen. So, I was madly in love with him and his voice and everything, and I wanted to write an essay about him, which I did. Of course, I had to explore what Adam Lambert really meant to me. That’s the whole point in writing. It’s not just, oh, I have a crush on Adam Lambert. That’s a seriously boring essay.
What he meant to me, I learned, is that he reminds me of when I was this hippie chick, a time that felt very free and you could live forever. I was like a flower child and all that. For some reason, the way he dressed, sort of outlandishly, intersected with that time in my life. So, after I wrote that essay, I came to the rather obvious conclusion that I've never written about my fear of death, which is one of my big obsessions. Writers write their obsessions, right? So, my first book focused on incest. The second covered my recovery from sex addiction. The third was a quasi, quirky quest for spirituality, focusing kind of on Pat Boone. I had this whole other huge obsession about death that I’d never really addressed.
I stumbled upon this website with these archaic words on it, and I thought, it's so sad that they're dead. I wanted to resurrect these archaic words, and they became part of the collection. Then, I started thinking about episodes in my life that spoke to my fear of physical death or, at the very least, the inconveniences in life. There’s one section in which I was forced to take piano lessons. I was a really good pianist when I could play by ear, but my piano teacher made me learn notes. That killed my love of playing piano. How could I craft this into an essay on surviving death? Well, it’s surviving a spiritual or emotional death.
After I had all of the essays written, they still didn’t quite connect. I don’t know how it came into my head, but I thought of the three Fates: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. I had them separated into three sections. Then I thought, the Fates needed to speak too. So, I made up this section as if the three Fates were actually speaking. They show the narrator fleeing from them, because they're after her. That’s how it evolved…piece by piece. It’s not as if I had the whole thing in my head to start with. God forbid, that would be too easy. It took about five years or so. In fact, I put it aside for a while and wrote a whole poetry collection.
I didn't really understand this was about my fear of death until I was about a year into it. The book starts off as this road trip. This narrator is driving in this gold Plymouth from the 1960s through these blighted sections of New Jersey. Also, I wanted it to be about collecting memories. In some ways, that’s at the heart of the book. If I can't survive physically (though I’m holding out hope that I can survive a physical death) my memories will be a form of immortality. How do we discover immortality? One way is through collecting memories. Part of the book’s structure is this metaphoric road trip, collecting memories, trying to make sense of them, seeing them anew. That took a long time to figure out.
DH: Which is your favorite essay?
SWS: Adam Lambert is one of them, and maybe “Flirting with the Butcher” is another, which is about my obsession with Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal. He’s the perfect metaphor for death. We all found out about him when I was first going into rehab for sex addiction and an eating disorder. I mean, cannibalism is the most extreme form of an eating disorder. There is just something about him that I found vulnerable, unlike your other cannibal serial killers. I had to explore what that meant. There are loads of serial killers. So, why did he fascinate me? It's not like I wanted to meet him or anything. He’s sort of scary. But when I’d see him interviewed on TV or read about him, he just looked so lost. He didn't look evil or aggressive like say some of those other serial killers who are still walking around in that egotistical I can get you attitude. He just looked lost. That was interesting for me to figure out my fascination with him.
It’s hard to choose a favorite essay because they all speak to different experiences. In some ways the first one, “The Eternal Reign of Miss Route 17,” when I'm just cruising this industry blighted Route 17 in northern New Jersey, which most people would find awful and ugly and polluted, but I’m obsessed with it. I really enjoyed writing about it as if I were there on this road trip when I was a teenager. Each section in a way has to speak to me or it wouldn't end up in the book. “Flirting with the Butcher” was hard. I worried about it. How could I write about Jeffrey Dahmer without repulsing people? Actually, I got an email from somebody who had read it, and she said, though she struggled to admit it, after reading the essay, she could sort of see Jeffrey Dahmer's humanity, and she was shocked by her own reaction. I took this as a great compliment. Of course, the larger goal was to see me, as the author, and my humanity. I didn't want it to come off as too gross or schtick, like oh a cannibal. It was important for me to get across my sense of alienation, loss, and loneliness and how it intersected with Dahmer’s alienation, loss, and loneliness.
DH: Which books and writers have influenced you?
SWS: I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, by Kelle Groom. That is one of the most magnificent memoirs I’ve ever read. The language is stunning. It’s so metaphorically written, with so much emotional authenticity. In terms of my earlier influences, I would say the books that influenced me the most as a writer were Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and The Lover by Marguerite Duras. Both are novels but are highly autobiographical. And White Horses by Alice Hoffman. I read those three books when I first started to write. Also, the poet Lynda Hull has had a huge impact on me.
Sue William Silverman (@SueSilverman) is an award-winning author of seven books of creative nonfiction and poetry. Her most recent memoir, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, was named “one of nine essay collections feminists should read in 2020” (Bitch Media). A previous memoir, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, was made into a Lifetime TV movie. She also wrote The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew. As a professional speaker, Silverman’s media interviews include The View, Anderson Cooper–360, and PBS-Books. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. You can find her at SueWilliamSilverman.com.
Debbie Hagan (@DebraHagan9) teaches creative writing at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is book reviews editor for Brevity literary magazine. Her writing has appeared in Boston Globe Magazine, Hyperallergic, Harvard Review, Superstition Review, Pleiades, Brain, Child, Don’t Take Pictures, and various anthologies. She has edited more than a dozen nonfiction books and is author of the creative nonfiction book Against the Tide (Hamilton Books, 2004). She can be reached at debbiehaganwriter@gmail.com.