Writing through grief - Melissa Todd explains how 'Americaned' became a different book from the one she had planned

Melissa Todd, referred to by a reader as 'the thinking person's dominatrix', shares her experience of writing through the grief at her mother's death while traveling across America for work, in her latest book Americaned.

Melissa Todd and the cover of her book 'Americaned'

Mostly I take pride in not allowing the grief to affect me. I am strong, I think, as she was, and I have a job to do here, and I will do it in tribute to her. Sometimes the grief overwhelms me unexpectedly, like a wave of nausea, often at the most improbable times. Drugs help, gin helps, but also I learn to fight down grief by reframing it. Rather than mourn that you’ve lost her, rejoice that you knew her. She wouldn’t want you to waste your own precious life in wailing and mourning. Some grief is inescapable, like being startled at a sudden noise, but you must not wallow in it to excess. Bereavement is hardly an uncommon state: it should be treated like a case of flu. I don’t tell anyone else. I don’t want their sympathy, their awkwardness, but also I don’t want their judgement that I am not sad enough. I’ve read Camus. I am sad, but I will honour my mother by burying it deep.

Received wisdom would call this a terrible idea, of course. I should wail for months, or store up profound psychological problems for myself. Bollocks, say I. The study that came up with that nonsense was empirically flawed. In fact, encouraging people to luxuriate in their negative feelings only extends their longevity and intensity. This has been shown in studies of abused children and Holocaust survivors, as well as more mundane, universal tragedies.  Like losing your mother.

Four days after she died I had to fly to the US for a month’s work. I didn’t tell any of my colleagues what had happened. I knew I’d fall apart at the first hint of sympathy. But after hours, I’d lock myself in my room and write. Long buried memories, fears for the future, but mostly, how to cope with now, this new strange state of being motherless. An only child to a single mum, we had been a team, a tight-knit unit, for 46 years. She was the constant audience to my chaotic one-woman show, and without her none of it made any kind of sense. I had to invent a new world to inhabit, so when not writing I’d be reading, novels and poetry, blessing my mum for teaching me to love stories, and giving me the courage to inhabit them.

The book that came from this experience was far from the one I’d planned. I’d hoped driving 1800 miles from North to South, wealth to poverty, might make a book, but it was supposed to be a jolly travelogue, a Bill Bryson-esque romp through quirky American customs, dinners, dialects. Instead it became - not a journey through grief, but alongside it. I’m always moving in the book, but unmoving grief is the story’s heart. As I drove I kept murmuring a poem by Thom Gunn called “On the Move”, which tells how we can’t outrun our fears.

“At worst, one is in motion; and at best | Reaching no absolute, in which to rest | One is always nearer by not keeping still.”

That felt soothing and right. Americaned begins in loss and grief, and even after weeks of driving and partying, the loss and grief are still raw at the close. 

Gunn says the seekers in his poem “almost hear a meaning in their noise.” I was never going to write a story of redemption, of personal growth conquering grief. I hate saccharine endings, and anyway, that’s not what happened. Driving down the East Coast didn’t redeem me. At the book’s close my mum’s still just as dead and I’m still the same chaotic hussy I was before I went to America. 

And yet - one is always nearer by not keeping still.

You can hear Melissa read from Americaned, on Sunday 3 November at Medway River Lit. Booking will open in October.

Melissa will have copies available to buy, and of her previous books, which are available on Amazon.