Good at Grief: A Conversation with E.A. Hanks

On curiosity, art, ritual, and the Dead Mom Club.

E.A. Hanks abiding by Rule Number 3, below.

HI

E.A. and I met on a balmy spring evening in Los Angeles in the early 2010s and nearly immediately started talking about our dead mothers. I don’t remember how the mutual recognition of mother loss pulled us into its sphere, though we were at a Passover Seder—a famously grief-forward event, as dinner parties go. Our friendship coalesced around writing, being Northern California babies, various forms of abandonment trauma, our obsession with tea, assorted ladies of Los Angeles’s canyons, America’s crises of conscience, and the abject woes of dating in one’s thirties. 

Over a decade, we nursed broken hearts and I came to understand exactly what E.A. means when she calls something a Strawberry Milkshake™. We learned how to care for each other out of urgency and necessity, hiked Griffith Park, swam Topanga Beach, walked home eating ice cream in the dark, stared down coyotes in the street. We evacuated again and again, fires and smoke and fear. And when I left Los Angeles in December 2019 to return to the farm where I grew up on Maui, we kept at it all, navigating friendship and fires and loss from afar.

Suzanne Joskow’s Passover Seder, 2016. Out of frame: Me and E.A. bonding.

Between us, we have weathered two dead moms, at least five heartbreaks, one suicide, and the destruction by wildfire of places fundamental to our core identities. In 2023, Maui suffered several devastating fires across the island. And earlier this year, E.A.’s hometown of Pacific Palisades burned to the ground. I will never forget the horror in her eyes when she FaceTimed me that week in January, crying. 

Of all things, her broken heart thought to apologize: “I’m sorry,” she gulped. “I’m sorry. We didn’t understand, after the fires on Maui. We didn’t know what it felt like.” I was stunned. “There’s nothing to apologize for,” I assured her. There’s no way to really know until you’re right there in it yourself.

The moment was particularly charged as E.A. was preparing for the release of her debut memoir The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road. This book was so much a part of her that it was also inevitably a part of our friendship. Retracing the steps of a road trip she and her mother took on the 10. The mystery and heft and dead mother grief of it. Her mother’s journals. Her mother’s poetry. The Minnie the Van of it all. 

Before E.A. left to uncover whatever violence and secrets lay on the asphalt between the mouth of the 10 in Santa Monica and its tail end in Florida, I mixed up some sage and lavender oils with distilled water in a cobalt spritzer bottle so she could carry the scents of home with her on the way. A little bit of my heart there, too.

Reading The 10, finally, was relief and homecoming. I saw my friend not just as the brilliant writer that she is, but as the wounded child who healed, the grief-stricken daughter finding steadiness in the ever not-knowing of adulthood. And it made me want to spend some time chatting with E.A. about how we do it: how we live with grief without getting lost in it. How we let joy live with us, too.

Below, a sketch of our conversation, gently edited for clarity and concision.

LD: Thanks for taking time to talk about this thing that’s always swirling around with us—we’re always in the mix with the grief. It came out very quickly when we first met, that we were both motherless daughters, and I think that informed our friendship and connection. I think we both recognized that need for companionship, that belonging to the Dead Mom Club, as you call it. So I thought we could put our heads together and offer people our, I don’t know, our best tips for survival as card-carrying members of the DMC. Shall we?

EAH: I mean look: For me, talking about grief is like eating eggs. Sometimes my body is like you need this on a molecular level…this straight-ass protein of eating eggs, of being in community with people who understand grief. And just like eating eggs, there’s a breaking point where I hit a wall—too many eggs, too much grief-talk. Maybe it’s because I’m twenty years deep, or because it feels like there’s dead-mom literature everywhere even though people seem to feel it’s rare and special. Or maybe it’s just a safety mechanism of boundaries and remove that kicks in. But what’s critical is finding ways to be in dialogue with what we've lost. 

And a lot of that is curiosity. During my press tour, I wanted to drive home the point that you don’t have to have a crazy mom or an ultra-famous dad to get curious about where you come from. There’s a chapter in The 10 where I go to Georgia O’Keefe’s house in Abiquiu [New Mexico], and that became an opportunity to think about my mom’s things, her home, the way her clothes smelled like smoke, how her kitchen sink was sometimes filled with cans loaded with maggots and sometimes packed with dishes from a seven-course meal. If you’re really paying attention, someone's home will tell you everything about them. You don’t need journals and an IMDB page and lost poems to investigate your history, you just have to remember the house you grew up in. The receipts are everywhere around you.

LD: How would you suggest someone summon the courage to look at those receipts? 

EAH: I was never afraid. Courage might be helpful but it’s not required. The only thing that’s required is curiosity. 

LD: And before curiosity, even, I think it’s also required that we give ourselves time and space to just be with loss. Which can be confronting in its own way, no?

EAH: Absolutely. My number one grief rule is that the first year is a wash. Make no major life decisions. Don’t get a pet, don’t move, don’t get married or divorced or have a baby, don’t even get a plant. It’s like in AA: You don’t get back to a quasi-neutral version of yourself until year five or year six. 

LD: One hundred percent. For me, the pain of loss didn’t abate significantly until year five. But what do you say to the person who wants to be done grieving after six months, or who thinks they just don’t have time?

EAH: You’re trying to browbeat grief with ego. You think that you are somehow harder, smarter, busier, wiser, untouchable. That this is somehow going to bypass you. The thing is, if it was good, you were always going to want more time with that person. And if it was bad, you’ll want to have somehow fixed it, the fantasy of closure. 

But there’s no good goodbye. There’s good death—and not all death is tragic—but all death is a loss. And how good are human beings, especially Americans, at dealing with loss? I want that person to get over themselves and to be much, much kinder to themselves. 

Their ego is protesting that you don’t need this, but plot twist: You do.

LD: That makes me think of something I read recently about grief from death doula Mara June: “I’m interested in the ways that grief disrupts colonial mentalities and ways of perceiving and moving through the world, and brings us back into deeper attunement with ourselves as ecosystems.” In other words, grief reveals our interdependence and forces us to think about the larger weave we are living within. It’s confronting, to recognize the vulnerability of interconnectedness. I think Mara is pointing to this truth that letting ourselves grieve can be a kind of foil to the hegemonic distaste we feel for knowing ourselves. 

EAH: The problem is, we no longer have time or resources or rituals for the beginning or end of life. Ritual is a kind of pageantry by which we prescribe meaning in our lives, and we’ve replaced ritual—well with nothing, we’ve eradicated it.

LD: It’s the bankruptcy of our culture, living without ritual. I grew up with parents who both fled the organized religion of their families (they were Ashkenazi Reform Jews), and a mother who I often refer to as the Queen of Ritual. But she was that way—constantly making up rituals—because she felt that she didn’t have any to draw from. I wonder a lot about what myths we have to fall back on in our culture, and how those affect us. Forgive me for referencing my college thesis, but this is actually what I wrote about: The way that mythologies are culturally fortifying and a lack of mythologies, or anti-mythologies, are culturally destructive. See for example: Obsession with celebrity culture in place of a relationship to a pantheon of gods and goddesses.

EAH: You know, we’re really brushing up against the psychological and cultural aftershocks of the extraordinary wasteland that is Whiteness. White Americans have divorced ourselves from the indigenous rituals we had to contemplate and experience grief. I have every faith that there are Americans that have rituals and processes for grief, but as a White American I do not have a toe in that cultural undercurrent. The loneliness of Whiteness is so apparent in the great moments of life, the moments that happen in myths. 

I was just at my high school and was asked about the journey as metaphor. My answer was: If it happens in fairy tales it’s really important, from Hermit Wisdom to the Journey. That’s the real stuff of life, the archetypes—and we see it in the stories and myths from around the world. But Whiteness is very expensive: we had to give up all our stories, our Irish stories, our Slovenian stories, Italian, German, wherever. We sacrificed all of those rituals, our cultures, to be able to call ourselves White Americans.

I think part of my discomfort about now being an author in the Dead Mom Book Club is that it’s a lot of White voices searching for a meaning that might be available to us if any of us were part of a tradition that teaches how to grieve.

I thought a lot about this after [my friend] Scott died, because I went to Scotland and presumed there was going to be some kind of meaningful, Old World process and instead it was just men in pain drinking.

LD: Classic. I had a similarly disappointing experience with my mom’s after-death. It was decided that we would have a celebration of life, and that felt completely absurd to me. I had not one celebratory cell in my body. I wanted to weep and mourn. Honestly, I wish we had sat shiva, though per my parents’ fleeing religion, that never would’ve happened. But I think the Jews really got it right with shiva, seven days of mourning and storytelling and eating and crying and taking little walks to remember our bodies. It seems right.

EAH: I think sitting shiva is genius. Leave it to the Jews, who are always in a minor key, to know how to grieve right. I’ve had some great laughs at shivas and it’s a complicated thing, but I think it’s that ritual we need. In the dearth of that we come up with shit that is essentially spiritual bypassing: Come and eat but don’t be a bummer! You were the person who introduced me to the language of spiritual bypassing: especially around 9/11, events of the Iraq War, and I can’t even begin with COVID—that wasn’t even spiritual, that was just bypassing. 

Again, not every death is a tragedy but to sidestep the reality of loss is such a disservice and it’s such a lie.

LD: So Rule Number 1: The first year is a wash. Maybe Rule Number 2 is to create ritual?

EAH: Absolutely. You have to create ritual and then you have to be a zealot for giving yourself space for whatever that ritual is. If it’s that you watch Planes, Trains & Automobiles every night for a week because it was your husband’s favorite movie, great. That means just as much as walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain or driving across the country. 

This is why you and I are good at grief: Grief is a process, and all artists know that there’s no judging process. As long as you’re not harming others or yourself, it’s all fair game. There’s no judging process unless you’re refusing to participate in process.

LD: Can we make t-shirts that say that, please? So Rule Number 1: First year is a wash. Rule Number 2: Create ritual. Rule Number 3?

EAH: My Number 3 is chase salt. Exercise, cry, swim in the ocean. Pony Sweat [dance class] was such a huge part of my grief process with Scott. You and I swam in the ocean multiple times in that period. I’m a big cryer and I let ‘er rip on that front.

Topanga Beach, 2019.

LD: We are undeniably good criers, thank goodness. So what comes after the salt exorcisms?

EAH: Rule Number 4 is to get curious. Look: I didn’t solve a crime with my book. It’s a book with a pretty ambiguous ending, 100,000+ words without resolution as to my grandfather’s criminality. One of the ways I came to terms with what I was offering readers was that I gave myself six or seven months where my only job was to be curious about my mother. I think about that trip and the extraordinary luxury of that time. That led me in so many rich directions. Grief is an opportunity to be curious about the really big things that happen in life. As John Lennon sang in “Beautiful Boy,” Llfe is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

LD: Not to harp on this, but do you think some people might resist that kind of curiosity? I do think it takes courage to be curious, because you have to be willing to actually see what you’re looking at. That’s not easy. So much of The 10—both the journey and the book—is you deciding to really see what’s in front of you. Not just to hold onto the receipts, but to do the math they reveal.

EAH: Not a lot of people carve out time to think about what really happens after death. On my trip, I struggled with whether I believe in souls. It does take courage to live in the liminal existence of not knowing, to sit with those questions or live in the mystery, or what Keats would call “negative capability.” Not knowing what you think and not knowing what it is for sure. 

But that’s just the kind of writer I am. If someone says, “You wanna go to Juarez?” I’m gonna go. But I can see and can hold empathy for the fact that answering these big questions can lead to a surprise about yourself or questioning your concept of faith or even wondering if faith is a virtue. I remember realizing I don’t consider faith a virtue. I consider doubt a virtue. 

When I talk to my mom, who am I talking to? When I dream about my mom, what’s happening? Is it just neurons firing? 

At one point in the book I pull tarot, but I make it clear I don’t care what’s happening. Ritual isn’t important because it’s actual magic, it’s important because it’s about how we ascribe meaning to things. And whatever you hit upon when you’re asking yourself these big questions is sound. Not sound theology, as in you are in accordance with what the Abrahamic religions say is the soul’s journey after death or what the church of Tweety Bird says. I mean it’s sound in that you’re living in accordance with your own self.

I think that’s why people don’t like talking to the dead. Because it feels silly. And so what if you are? Does that mean it’s not working? It’s pretend? Or does it just mean you’re doing what you need to do for yourself?

LD: I had that same experience, questioning the way I’d talk with my mom after she died. Or rather—she would start talking to me in this way that felt like her words were just pouring through me and I needed to get them down. It was so voluminous that I couldn’t write fast enough by hand, I had to type on a computer. So I have all these documents of me kind of channeling my mom. And the whole time it was happening, as I would hear her voice clear as a bell in my own mind, I was also thinking: This might just be me, some part of my own brain giving me this experience because it’s what I need. And that was always fine with me. Whether it was her or me or whatever part of her that is now in me.

EAH: Exactly: The narrative is that you’re channeling your mother. But the truth is that you were thinking about your mom and you allowed something to come to the surface and it met some deep psychological need. 

LD: Yes. It often felt like seeing my mother after she died was a matter of clearing away the cobwebs of posthumous idolization. It can be easy to sugarcoat the truth about the dead. But both of our mothers left us with a lot of text—my mother’s books and poems, your mother’s journals and poems. What was it like to edit your mother’s poetry for the book, to get to know her through her words?

EAH: Every aspect of my relationship with my mother—including with my dead mother—is informed by the fact that she never got to live an entirely realized life. Whereas your mom had a whole career, a calling, and she was successful in that, mine was an unrealized artist. And her delusions about being an actress were not a fantasy I was willing to whitewash posthumously. 

It began with me including one of her poems, lightly edited, to show the degree to which I was editing her and, quite frankly, her madness. I remember talking about the poetry with a valued reader, and he kept questioning my choice to put in this insane chunk of text and in the same breath moving on with the story. He kept coming back to what he saw as the elephant in the room. I finally realized: What’s happening here is I’m so used to how crazy my mom was and you’ve never seen this before. So you’re getting a front row seat to the unadulterated insanity that I’m both completely used to, and which has been there through the whole book for me. 

In that sense, I don’t remember deciding to include her poetry as a choice. I found her journals and the poetry at the same time and it felt self-evident that they would both be in the book. And then I realized there was so much madness in the poetry that for it to work as part of the book they would have to be heavily edited for clarity. And I was not willing to let anyone else do that editing. So when I started going through this binder and pulling the poems from 1996, from our trip, I started with poems that mapped to geography and followed with poems that were thematically appropriate. Somewhere in there, I realized I was sharing 20-plus years of my mother’s wordsmithing, and was treating my mom like a real writer. 

I was not editing for her ego, I wasn’t doing a favor to somebody, I was editing the poems on their own terms, trying to bring out their best qualities and her best qualities. Editing is a conversation. You’re asking: What did you intend versus what’s on the page? How can I help clear away the extraneous? The poems began to transform. Having my mother’s voice in my head and knowing her well enough to know what she would want preserved in each poem—that’s where the conversation happened. And it was incredible to realize that I still had instincts about what she would have wanted all the years later.

LD: I was incredibly moved to know her through that lens in the book—your way of seeing her through her own words, the gift of giving her words a place on the page. 

Speaking of, let’s make Rule Number 5 our favorite books and resources for grieving. What’s on your list?

EAH: My Appollonian recommendation would be Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. For as woowoo and Californian as I am, I do not ascribe to a god concept that most people would see as having religion; this is a book of grief written by a fellow non-believer. 

And my Dionysian recommendation would be Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist who studies synesthesia and wrote these imagined versions of what happens in the afterlife. One is a waiting room where you remain until the last time someone says your name, so all the greatest celebrities are the most miserable people ever. In another, god ignores everyone and sits on a roof reading Frankenstein and commiserating with the monster’s pain while Mary Shelley rules paradise. There’s one where you live your entire life over again but you spend your time doing one single thing for the sum total length you did it throughout your life, say 8 years brushing your teeth, 9 years of shitting, 14 years of fucking, 35 years of sitting in traffic. 

There’s one vision of the afterlife from Sum that I think about often, in which energy can neither be created nor destroyed and a molecule of you bumps up against a molecule of someone you love and on some level they recognize each other. There’s this dark matter question mark: If we’re never created and never destroyed, then what is death? It’s a good use of my time to think about this. It makes ice cream taste better.

LD: That’s a real strawberry milkshake: you, me, ice cream, and questioning dark matter resonance. I’ll add one to the list that’s been a steadfast companion for all kinds of grief: Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. And, y’know, this beautiful book my friend wrote called The 10.

EAH: Aww.

LD: Thank you, my friend. All of this has been at the core of our friendship since the beginning, all the joy and connection in the messiness and sorrow of grief. 

EA: Similar to art-making!

LD: Exactly so.

E.A. and me in California sunshine.

STAY SANE

Thanks for being in community with me.

Love,

Lily