Jane Green: Grief and Redemption and Literature

I first met Jane Green at a Cosmopolitan reception earlier this summer honoring some of the magazine’s favorite “fun and fearless” women writers, and we had a great time talking about the image of “chick lit” in literary circles. So when she was putting together a virtual book tour, and was wondering if Beatrice readers might be interested in the story behind her new novel, Second Chance, I greenlighted the idea immediately, before I had even the faintest notion of the loss and recovery that lay behind the story.

I was sitting in my office, procrastinating as usual by surfing around the web reading various news stories. ‘Brits still missing’ announced one, the day after the tsunami occurred, a tragedy that for me, here in America, was terrible but didn’t affect me on a personal level.

Until I saw a name I knew: Piers Simon. I had spoken to him three weeks before, had known, but forgotten, he was flying to Thailand for Christmas to visit his brother who was teaching there. Piers Simon. The words were blurry on the screen as I squinted to focus and my head filled with fog. It didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be the same one. These things don’t happen to people we know.

I had met Piers a few years before. He was a garden designer and had designed my garden in Westport, Connecticut, flying over from his home in England every few weeks to traipse around my garden and make me laugh with his stories. He was thirty-three. Tall, handsome, and the sweetest man I had ever met with an infectious giggle that was irrestistible. He quickly became a friend, staying in our spare room when he came over, jumping in the pool with the kids, sitting on the deck drinking a beer with me as the sun set.

I phoned his mother a few days later, holding it together until the end of the phone call when we both started crying. It didn’t seem real, and the grief was shocking to me, sweeping me up in its clutches and not letting go for months, playing an endless tape of memories of Piers in my head, over and over, but never enough.

He wasn’t a husband, a boyfriend, a best friend. He was someone I adored, but not inner circle, and I didn’t feel entitled to feel the way I did, it felt too much, I didn’t know who I could share it with. And so, as with all eventful emotional experiences in my life, I knew I had to write about it, to express it on the page as a means of getting over it.

But life never seems to go according to plan.

As I was preparing my novel about grief, about a girl who loses her best friend, my own life started to change, and because so much of my work draws upon my own life experience, the book started to change with it.

I had been married for seven years. Had moved four times, borne four children, written eight novels, and redecorated more times than I could count. I had thrown endless parties, was a bright and sparkling hostess, but hadn’t realized that I was filling my life with distractions to prevent me from focusing on my underlying unhappiness, and more frightening, the cause.

We moved house again. I swept everybody up to the country, to a beautiful farm in the middle of nowhere thinking that my old suburban town was the root cause, that if we lived a simpler life, a quieter life, I could stop the rumblings of dissatisfaction and finally find peace.

Once we reached the country, there were no more distractions, and I was forced to finally face the cause of my unhappiness: my marriage. I had married a good man, but entirely the wrong man for me. I had married him not because I loved him, but because I was thirty, because I thought that this was what I was supposed to do at thirty, because I thought time was running out.

I knew he would be a good husband, a good father, and I thought—oh how I prayed—that I would fall in love, that over time I would know I had made a good decision, that although I had never had passion, what we had—friendship, shared aims—was so very much more important.

We separated and I moved back to my old town, to a tiny cottage by the beach, myself and my four children squeezed into a house that was roughly as big as my old kitchen. And I started to find peace again, and I started to remember who I was before I got married, who I was before I turned myself into the wife I thought I was supposed to be.

And when I sat down to write Second Chance, I knew that it couldn’t be a book solely about grief. It had to be a book about finding happiness, about a group of people who are all, in one way or another, lost, who are only able to find their way home after the catalyzing event of losing their friend.

Holly is the one trapped in the unhappy marriage. As with all my books, it is not about me, but I was able to draw on my experiences, process some of the confusion, the pain, and the hope. My editor was nervous when she heard I was including a couple who would end up divorced. “You are too raw,” she said, but when I handed the book in, she was relieved. It isn’t raw, or bitter, or angry, but an honest look at what happens when we get married for the wrong reasons, a story about realizing it’s never too late to take a different path.

And so it is a book that is about grief, but it is also about redemption. I have been lucky—in my own life I have found someone who has taught me the meaning of love, who has helped me find the peace I was searching for all those years—and I am discovering that happy endings do not exist solely in the pages of a novel, that life does sometimes imitate art after all.

24 July 2007 | guest authors |