Erin Slaughter Tries to Order the Disorder in “The Dead Dad Diaries” https://ift.tt/0ClOIoL
I first encountered Erin in Conway, South Carolina on the Coastal Carolina University campus when she read from her new story collection, A Manual for How to Love Us. We both teach there now. The story she read that spring day in 2023, “Nest,” is my favorite kind of fiction — quirky, voice-driven, and about a dead parent. I was immediately drawn in by this sad, funny story about two sisters grieving their father’s death differently, one convinced he’s inhabited a fly buzzing around the house, the other imagining him embodying the tangled knot of hair behind her ear.
Since then, we’ve become friends, and I’ve read and loved more of her work. She’s published books in fiction and poetry and has a new memoir, The Dead Dad Diaries. In this book, Erin writes devastatingly about her father’s murder the day before she started her senior year of high school. This heartfelt collaged portrait of grief moves from the dreamlike funeral preparations right after the murder to studying court records and her father’s diary entries in an act of acceptance years later.
In addition to fiction and memoir, Erin has written two poetry collections: The Sorrow Festival (CLASH Books, 2022), and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, The Georgia Review, CRAFT, and elsewhere. She was editor and co-founder of literary journal and chapbook press The Hunger. Originally from Texas, she holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University and a PhD from Florida State University. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Coastal Carolina University.
I spoke to Erin at our favorite coffee shop in Surfside Beach about her new memoir. Because our conversation got out of hand, which is to say that it wandered and weaved in a very fun but not easily transcribable way, we finished the interview via email. What you see here is a combination of both.
You’ve been writing parts of this book since you were in undergrad, over a decade ago. What parts were there from the beginning and what do you think made those sections withstand a decade’s worth of revisions, additions, and deletions?
Although the manuscript as a whole has been through many revisions, there are a couple pieces I wrote in undergrad that stayed more or less in their original forms; the oldest probably is “Dartanian,” an essay about my first car and relationship with my stepdad. I remember turning that in for a nonfiction workshop my junior or senior year. The first section of the book, a series of vignettes recounting the week of my father’s funeral, and a large portion of the “Rendering” section, were written during the first year of my MFA program, almost exactly ten years ago. I think (or at least I’d hope) my technical skills as a writer are stronger than they were then, but there’s something about the earliest material that holds a sharp spark — I think that is some of the most emotionally powerful writing, because I was closer to the events I was writing about, both psychologically and chronologically.
The thing about writing and revising a book over the course of ten years is that it’s a collaboration with so many different selves. The self who began writing this book couldn’t fathom the people who would be reading it now, or the self I would be as I’m presenting it to the world now. Throughout my twenties, the manuscript represented a distant sort of hope and dread, knowing that this is the one story I’ve always felt I was meant to tell, and believing it would manifest in some way, though I didn’t know when or how it would be published, or what degree of attention it would get. The twenty-two-year-old person in my MFA, writing the gritty details about my eating disorder and casual sex and all of these wild things, did not fathom that when this book came out, I would be, you know, a person with dignity and colleagues and students. But at the same time, I also didn’t fathom that I would have friends in my life who have been along this journey with me, or that I would have befriended other writers I admire, who have read this book and told me, “I have so much compassion for your younger self who went through this.” That’s beautiful and weird, too, in a way, when so much of my early writing was a desperate shout into the void of loneliness, a pathway of begging to be known and seen and to prove what had happened to me.
In Natasha Tretheway’s memoir, Memorial Drive, she writes about her mother’s murder: “You get used to it. Most days it is a distant thing, always on the horizon, sailing toward me with its difficult cargo.” As you moved through these different versions of yourself and your dad’s death got further away, how did your writing about it change?
The entirety of my grieving process (whatever that means in an ongoing sense) took place through the writing of this book. For years, I used to have a ritual where on each anniversary of my dad’s death, I would spend time writing something for the book. So what happens in the final section, “Rendering,” is what I consider to be the first moment of — I don’t want to say closure, but a breakthrough in truly feeling my dad’s murder and the weight of it. That section describes a box that my grandmother sent me, and my notes in that section are notes I was actively typing as I was sobbing and pulling items out of the box. I was doing it all simultaneously, experiencing this huge moment in the journey of my grief, and simultaneously filtering the experience through the process of commenting on it and recording it, turning it into a story even as it was happening.
Something I think about a lot is that in the first draft, when I was writing what professors and cohorts in my MFA considered to be very raw, visceral explorations of grief, I didn’t see them that way. I was like, “This isn’t a big deal, this is just what happened.” I didn’t feel the weight of what I was writing, even though there was some level of emotional catharsis that took place within it. And that mirrors the strange, sideways angle at which I have grieved at a remove. Of course, my dad being murdered is the most profound thing that’s happened to me; it defines who I am in so many ways; I wrote this whole book digging into the wound of it. And yet, it still makes me a little squirrely to imagine mourning in an earnest way. Even though I’m certain at times I cried, or missed my dad, my own initial reaction to his death was so tied up with being in contrast to my family’s more public, more urgent reactions. I was always thinking about it in my own cloistered way, but I was adamant about not allowing the narrative of his death to overtake the narrative I had about my own life.
I loved the way you described the writing of “The Interview with Emptiness” chapter — part of the book’s “Retracing” section — like these two different versions of yourself were interrogating one another. Can you talk a bit about that?
The epigraph says it was written on my father’s death day the year I moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky to start my MFA, but I added that afterwards to make it fit the “Grief Archive” section in the book. I think maybe it came together in pieces around that time, rather than on one specific day. I took inspiration from a Richard Siken poem, “Unfinished Duet,” where there’s a back and forth between two speakers, and it almost feels like a person arguing with themselves, or one side of the self trying to tell a story and the other side completing the story in some cases, undercutting it in others. Siken said in an interview that he thinks of that poem as a conversation between the self who started writing [his first poetry collection] Crush, and the self who finished it. That wasn’t the intention for this, but I do think it was a conversation with myself in an abstract poetic space, parsing through images from my life, fragments that got at the root of a struggle I didn’t have clear, explanatory language for. As with so much of this book, there’s an accusatory self and a guilty self, and they are always at war and always completing each other; they are participating in the same moments together and interpreting them differently.
That’s [the essay] where a line stood out to me: “…if they knew what was coming, they wouldn’t claim to love me.” You’re talking about fear of your parents’ reactions, first to coming out, and then to [publishing] this book. I love that it comes in the middle of the book because it speaks to what came before, and to what comes after. That line makes the book shimmer differently, shifting and expanding the meaning of the whole thing.
Wow, that’s wonderful, and I’m glad… I wrote that paragraph in revisions in 2021 or 2022, and it felt powerful, like I’d finally found the words to articulate one of the deepest and most shameful, hidden truths of my life, at least when it comes to my relationship to my family.
Like, I mention this is one of the essays, but when I was in college and first started writing about my parents, they were upset by details that I thought were very innocent.
Oh, your mom smoking cigarettes in the garage and her being upset [that you wrote about that].
And that was just a fact, not something she would try to hide from anyone in daily life. My parents had this attitude, at least at the time all those years ago when we talked about it, that, you know, people change and they get better, so you shouldn’t write about bad things they did in the past, because it’s not fair to them.
And in the genre of memoir, there are all these questions that arise, essentially asking: when is your story actually yours? When you’re including other people in it who don’t consent to being written about, do you still have a right to write about those things? I don’t claim to have a definitive answer, but the guideline I’ve adopted for myself, in order to believe that I’m operating ethically, is that the writer should always make themselves more vulnerable on the page than anyone else. You should always be willing to look worse than other people you’re writing about. And it should be a balance; no one should be a one-dimensional hero or villain.
You write that you “never felt as close to [your] father as those nights drunk in [your] apartment alone, crawling to [your] bedroom and laughing at nothing for no one to hear.” You say, “My sobriety means breaking the curse, for him… as much as for myself.” Could you talk more about how you came to understand him as you dealt with your own addictions?
It wasn’t until I became an alcoholic that I understood him on a personal level. I was sixteen when he died, and my perception of him at that time was a limited, bratty, teenage understanding: “This is my distant, alcoholic father who doesn’t know how to engage with me on an emotional level, and doesn’t care about my friends or my dreams or learning who I actually am.” I sensed I was pretty different from him — he was a very white collar, introverted computer guy, and I was an artsy theatre kid. It’s funny, because in my adult life I’ve turned out to be much more like him than I ever thought I could be.
So when he died, it was complicated, because I did love him, but I only saw him twice a year and didn’t particularly enjoy those visits because of his drinking. I think as a teenager I judged his addiction, and the cycle of him never owning up to it until things got bad enough that he’d say he was getting help, but then nothing changed. Until college, I never considered his interior life. It wasn’t until I was living alone at age 19, 20, 21, when I was spending my nights getting shitfaced in my apartment by myself, that I started to see him as a person in his own right, outside of being my dad.
I understand it in a different way now that I’m four years sober, because he had only been sober for two weeks when he died. I think a lot about the ways I’ve changed in sobriety, and the ways he might have become different. There’s no guarantee of that, but I imagine a version of him who would have stayed sober, and that we would have an adult relationship different from the one I had with him growing up.
In the book’s preface, you discuss the five stages of grief created by psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Your book is broken into five sections describing the stages of grief as you experienced them. I love the definitions of rendering in your last section of the same name: “to dare, to give back… to perform; to melt down… a relinquishing… to deliver a judgement… to strip apart the carcass of an animal, slice away what obscures… to make from the remains of the dead something useful.” How does your rendering of this experience — in its many meanings — correlate with Kubler-Ross’s stages?
In that preface where I talk about Kubler-Ross’s theory of the “five stages of grief,” I also mention her intention was never for the stages to be thought of as chronologically successive, or all-encompassing. Our cultural tendency to simplify something as messy and individualized as grieving has led to the myth that all grief begins on a one-way track called “Denial,” en route to its final destination of “Acceptance,” and after that, you’ve completed the process and are forever free from it. That misunderstanding, in my view, is one of many ways that victims of loss are made to feel unseen.
So the five sections of the book mirror the five stages of grief in structure, but they’re more like five distinct themes I categorized the overall experience into. The material within them is not chronological, and they don’t correlate one-for-one, except maybe the final section, where there is a kind of closure that happens, both for me as the writer experiencing it, and for the arc of the book. My intention with “Rendering” and choosing that title was to include the writing process in an upfront, almost meta way, as a key part of the “acceptance.”
Gregory Orr, in his book Poetry as Survival, writes about “ordering the disorder” of traumatic life experiences by using the lyric poem — the first-person “I” speaker — to give the writer agency over the telling of it. We can’t change the events or their impact on us, but we can gain power over them and make sense of them by integrating them into our own narratives, or prioritizing our own emotional truth within them. But I think there’s a flip side to that: the danger of distancing oneself further from the reality of those events by narrativizing them, or believing that the purpose of suffering is to conjure a story from it, that personal trauma is something you can mine for material and then walk away from unscathed.
You write that the ER nurse you dated in Florida found and read the victim impact statement online that you read for the sentencing of your father’s murderer. I remember feeling the same way he did when I read it, seeing Erin Slaughter the writer in that statement you wrote at eighteen. Do you think you were already a writer when you wrote that letter? When you look at it now, in what ways do you identify with that writer?
I don’t think, when I wrote it, that I would have considered myself “A Writer,” except my belief that the impulsive desire to express my perception of the world through writing has always lived inside me. I remember composing that statement at my grandmother’s house in Alabama a day or two before the sentencing, the same house where we’d stayed during the funeral, and showing it to my mom and grandma and them being impressed by it — that felt satisfying, to be told my writing had a special power to influence legal decisions or sway the emotions of strangers in the courtroom.
But when I recall actually writing it, and reading it on the witness stand, and when I look back at it now, what I see is someone using the craft of writing to convincingly say what other people wanted to hear. Perhaps what the entire project of the book is really about is that my genuine personal experience of my father’s murder and its effects on our family does not fit a traditional, expected narrative about victims, perpetrators, and survivors. It’s called a “Victim Impact Statement,” but I have never recognized myself in the language of “victim,” and its explicit purpose was to sentence my father’s murderer to the harshest sentence available, which is something I was then, and continue to be, ambivalent about. When I “revised” that statement in the version that’s included in the book, adding annotations that more truthfully expressed what I was glossing over or outright omitting in the original, I think that is the evidence of my becoming a writer, if anything is.
NONFICTION The Dead Dad Diaries
By Erin Slaughter
Autofocus Books
Published September 23, 2025
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