The Tender Torment of Loving the Ones Who Suffer: Rebecca Spiegel’s “Without Her” https://ift.tt/1sTjYFR
We move quietly between our professional and personal commitments until something unthinkable screeches us to a halt. Rebecca Spiegel’s sister Emily took her life at twenty-one. The author began chronicling her unfathomable grief and unspoken love on Medium’s online publishing platform, which snowballed into her first book, Without Her: A Chronicle of Grief and Love. A meditation on loss and mental illness, the memoir digs into the bones of eating disorders, body image issues, suicidal ideation, familial abuse, and the flawed nature of human relationships through the agonizing retrospective lens of a sibling’s suicide.
Writing about grief is a tricky and complicated endeavor, more so when it comes from people you share blood with. How do you transform such tender torment into words? How do you capture your sister’s legacy while making sure your work stands as a singular body of literature? Spiegel, whose writing process is embedded in the narrative of Without Her, considers the memoir “a prayer, a plea, a search for order, a neurotic need to assign meaning to things.” Meaning-making is perhaps the most natural reaction to death, and Spiegel documents not just the immediate aftermath of Emily’s suicide, which she spends in Philadelphia, or the three years that follow in New Orleans but brings to light glorious and inglorious moments from their shared childhood and adulthood, to paint the portrait of a flawed, beautiful, and incandescent sister. Emily’s absence is written all over the pages, but her presence is embedded between the lines.
Without Her maintains a somber tone and linear storyline with occasional flashbacks, internal monologues, and deeply personal anecdotes entering and exiting seamlessly. It tends to drag on at times with inconsequential details, the pacing seemingly mimicking the recklessness and irrational sequence of how we process trauma and tragedies. It flows in an uncomfortable steadiness, slows down in moments, and explodes with gripping, dramatic tension at others. Spiegel and Emily’s relationship occupies significant space as the author traces it via in-depth text message conversations, Gmail chats, diary entries, childhood illustrations, and adult drawings. Rebecca Spiegel, the author, hides behind Becca, the narrator/Emily’s sister graciously. However, when Becca has an impassioned, infuriating fight with her partner J or breaks a dinner plate on her father’s head when he refuses to let go of her hand, it serves as a reminder that Spiegel isn’t just a passive narrator. She is as much a living, breathing heartbeat of this story as Emily.
While Spiegel explores the role depression, anxiety, addiction, and other mental illnesses played in Emily’s death, she digs much deeper into eating disorders, and rightly so. The author confronts how Emily’s eating disorders divided and connected her with her family while she was alive and in the wake of her suicide. Spiegel experienced a great deal of alienation due to how “her [Emily’s] illness monopolizes your family’s attention, makes you feel invisible, or like you should be.” There is a constant examination of the author’s own struggles with eating disorders and suicidal ideation, as well as an analysis of her sister’s patterns. One heartbreaking moment, albeit wholly believable, is when Emily goes through a particularly tumultuous time with her eating disorders and loses a lot of weight. But instead of concern, the author feels jealous of her skinny sister. This hits home for a generation afflicted with a rising trend in body image issues and goes on to prove its duality: the perceived imperfection of a perfect body image and the fundamental flaw in romanticizing a particular body type.
Without Her ends on a note of conclusion and continuation. It is both an answer and a question that lingers perpetually, as well as an acknowledgment of grief and frustration of human limitations. One of the most poignant realizations that Spiegel lands on, and what is the single biggest takeaway from Without Her, is that we can look for signs of struggle in people, do our best to make them feel heard and loved, and yet still fail to save people when they don’t want to be saved. It reiterates an excruciating acceptance of a rather unacceptable phenomenon spearheaded by excellent but equally devastating memoirs like Everything is Fine by Vince Granata and The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide by Antonella Gambotto-Burke. While the scene of Emily’s suicide leaves the most harrowing impression, Spiegel’s ironic thank you to her sister “for the space you’ve given us to focus on other things…[and] because our parents are so much better than I’ve ever known them to be” feels like the gut-wrenching punch of helplessness and heartache that lingers long after a loved one is gone.
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