The hardest part of this book, and how she writes it

We've crossed into the hardest part of this book together.

If you're caught up through Chapter 12, you know the section I mean. This is where Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom Is Dead stops circling the loss and walks straight into it. I want to spend this week's letter there with you.

There's a moment early in this stretch where a hospice nurse gives Nissel the most direct instruction in the entire book: "Your job now is just to be her daughter and help her have a good death." I keep returning to how plainly that's stated. No metaphor, no softening. Just a job description for the hardest task a daughter can be handed. As writers, we talk a lot about subtext and implication, but sometimes the most devastating sentence is the one that simply says the true thing.

Then, on page 103, Nissel shows us what that job actually looks like from the inside. She writes: "As I did, I no longer cared about my mom's last words. I only cared about saying words I wanted her to hear. I sat by her side reading Phenomenal Woman until the sun went down.

Notice what she's doing here. The grief isn't performed outward, toward us as readers. It's relocated entirely inward, toward what she needs to say and why. That's a meaningful craft choice. Nissel shows us a daughter releasing that need entirely, choosing presence over preservation. That reversal is what makes this passage land the way it does.

Chapter 10 makes a structural choice worth sitting with too. Nissel includes the nurse’s actual journal entries from this period, the real-time record of her mother's decline. Reading them is visceral in a way that polished prose can't always achieve. There's something about the unedited immediacy of a journal entry, written without knowing how the story ends, that polished retrospective narration simply can't fake. I want us to talk about why she made that choice and what it costs her to let us see something so unfinished and raw.

And then there's page 107. "They bought you roses, huh? Sounds like people are excited to see you," she said. This is the nurse managing the “hallucinations” of Nissel’s mother as she is close to crossing over to the other side. Here, I nearly lost it. And then, just a page later, the tension breaks again. Nissel has a gift for placing relief directly beside devastation, often within the space of a single page turn. That rhythm, tighten and release, tighten and release, is one of the most technically demanding things a memoirist can do, and she makes it look effortless.

Chapters 11 and 12 move us into the world after. The disorientation of trying to find your footing again after one of the largest losses a life can hold. I suspect many of you will find this section deeply relatable, whether or not you've experienced this particular kind of grief. Loss has a way of teaching all of us the same lessons in different rooms.

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A FEW THINGS BEFORE NEXT WEEK

I'd also love for you to bring one line from Chapters 9 through 12 into the Bookum chat this week, the sentence that stayed with you the longest. I'll be reading every single one.

→ Join the conversation: If you’re in the LA area, we’d love to see you for our closing discussion with Angela Nissel on July 12th at Reparations Club. We’ll have details close to the date on streaming options for those that aren’t local. 

For more details and to register: https://angelaxrepclub.eventbrite.com 

Take care of yourselves this week. This is heavy material, and it's allowed to be heavy.

With love and a dog-eared page,

Ashley 

Permission to Write