Just One Thing with Alexandra Dos Santos

Alexandra Dos Santos’s “Dolls Like Chucky” is a speculative memoir about grief’s journeys, from the mundane to the sacred. Here, she shares just one thing about the piece.

Alexandra Dos Santos and a carful of plush friends.

The moment I saw my mom’s dead body lying there with the statues, I knew I’d have to write about it one day. I never imagined I’d see something like that in real life—something so jarring and steeped in symbolism. It was the first time I ever saw her without a soul. Aside from the abject pain, there was a certain horror there, too. The “Other” was someone who was a part of me. My fear stole me from her. If you ever lost someone you love, you can probably relate to that uncanny feeling. The moment you see their corpse is a threshold; even though you’re still in the reality where they’re alive, you know you’ll have to force yourself into this freezing new reality, like walking forward into freezing black waves. I wanted somewhere to place that moment of suspended reality, so I reached for what I knew best: horror and Catholicism. I taught a workshop on Speculative Memoir this year and asked the writers to locate their most intense emotion—something that overflows—and make it into something fantastical. A creature or magical land or scenario. In my essay, living dolls and sentient statues are containers for what I don’t have language for. It was the only way I could tell the story as I felt it.

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