Rebecca Spiegel teaches writing in Philadelphia, where she lives with her family. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and Without Her is her first book.
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Rebecca Spiegel’s debut memoir, Without Her (Milkweed Editions, 2024), is a stark and unflinching examination of grief in the wake of a sibling’s suicide. While working as a teacher in New Orleans, Spiegel learns of her sister Emily’s death, a loss that propels her into a deeply personal journey through grief, family history, and the lingering question of what, if anything, could have been done differently. As she navigates memory and life without Emily, Spiegel revisits their shared experiences and delves into her sister’s struggle with mental illness. What emerges is a poignant narrative that, as grief itself refuses neatness and order, refuses easy closure or resolution. Spiegel’s writing boldly and honestly depicts the raw, visceral pain of sudden death as she searches for understanding and ultimately acknowledges that some questions will forever remain unanswered. Bravely unpacking grief’s relentless grip, Without Her is a powerful testament to the complexities of love, family, and our enduring struggle to survive. In our conversation, Spiegel reflects on acknowledging and moving through guilt, the balance between impulse and empathy, and the emotional weight of centering her sister’s voice.
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Stephanie Trott: Without Her started out as a series of self-published entries on Medium, an online publishing platform. Where did the urge to share in this way initially come from?
Rebecca Spiegel: I wish I had a clear answer to that. Though I was probably not aware of it at the time, shortly after my sister’s death, I think the real urge was to let the people in my life know what I was feeling. For some reason, it felt far easier for me to share that in writing, even publicly, than it did to have conversations with my family or friends. What I can say about sharing online is that there’s a distance I appreciate. People can engage with something if they want to, but I’m not putting it in anyone’s face. In a way, that feels safer to me.
ST: Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of this writing, from online posting to book publication? You sold your manuscript while unagented, right?
RS: Yes—and that was thanks to my graduate thesis director, the writer David Gessner, who really believed in and championed my manuscript, and Daniel Slager, the publisher and CEO of Milkweed Editions, who was willing to take a chance on me.
I received such a response to that first Medium post that I was motivated to keep sharing. I had titled the post “It’s Been Two Months,” and perhaps it was from there that I decided to document my grief in monthly installments. As I continued to write and share, people sent messages encouraging me to consider turning the work into a book, looking into MFA programs, publishing in larger outlets, etc. And I listened. I think I wanted to listen. I had a dormant fantasy of being a writer. I also had $11,000 in education awards from an Americorps program I’d completed that would eventually expire, so I applied to MFA programs in creative nonfiction and used an edited collection of Medium posts as my writing sample. I went into my program at UNC Wilmington with a clear goal: I was going to develop that project into a book.
ST: Was there a moment in your writing process that significantly affected or changed how you told your sister’s story?
RS: I can’t think of a moment or an event that changed how I told her story, but I do know that there was a point at which I finally accepted that she had to have a larger presence. Her story had to be more a part of my own story. Because the book originated from my reflections on my experience of grief, that was not the case for a while. Emily was in the background, and I kept her story separate from my own.
ST: And it was in your graduate program, where you worked on the majority of this book, that your readers said they wanted to see more of Emily on the page.
RS: Right, and I was resistant to that for a while. It was such a personal project, so feedback was difficult to take in. I mean, I did take it in. It was necessary, and it made the writing better. It’s really just that I wanted to protect Emily and my connection to her. I didn’t want to share that with other people, and I also didn’t want to feel like I was exploiting her by telling her story since she wasn’t there to correct it.
ST: What right do the living have to the lives and stories of the dead?
RS: I’m not sure anyone has a right to anyone else’s story, living or dead. But I do think that because we are interconnected, there is overlap among all of our stories, and when someone’s story is so intertwined with another’s, I do think it’s less morally ambiguous to delve into that connection if there’s a clear reason for sharing. There’s a case to be made for doing that as long as it’s done with humility.
ST: Without Her features scanned images of entries from your sister’s diary, a note she left you on the back of a photograph, and some of her art. There are also screenshots of digital conversations between you and Emily. Why was it important to you as an author to include these primary sources?
RS: Part of what made it important is that I had such strong, visceral reactions when I first encountered the objects that would eventually make their way into the book, and I felt like the only way, or maybe the best or clearest way, for me to share what I felt with the reader was to offer them that same encounter.
The other thing is that from the beginning, I paired my words with photos that had a connection to Emily, whether it was a photo she had taken or liked or used in some project she’d done. They didn’t necessarily speak to the text, but there was an emotional resonance, an invisible subtext that was just for me. As the project evolved, the photos were cut, but I had still come to see what I was doing as a kind of collage. So it made complete sense to me when my friend Robin Walter suggested I replace the transcription of something Emily had written to me with an image of the original handwritten note. I think handwriting feels real. It brings text to life. There’s an intimacy to including those primary sources.
As for the digital correspondence, what comes to mind is the one really long Google Chat conversation that’s included in part two of the book. That felt important to include because it allows the reader to observe Emily’s mental state and how I was struggling to navigate it. I’m not sure I would have been able to put that into words. I wanted the reader to be able to see it for whatever it was and make what they wanted to make of it.
ST: But that act of looking at these inclusions is also similar to looking at art more broadly. You’re asking us to witness, to stare, and perhaps to put our own interpretation on what we’re seeing. But with showing and telling so much in this memoir, what’s the power of not telling the reader something?
RS: I took a poetry class with the poet Mark Cox once, and there was a reading he assigned that really stuck with me—“On the Function of the Line” by Denise Levertov—because of the distinction made between a personal and a private detail. A personal detail is something that serves the poem or text as a whole and brings it to life. A private detail is one that doesn’t really cohere with the narrative—there’s no place for it because whatever associations it has for the writer are inaccessible to the reader. While there are plenty of personal details included in the book, there are just as many private details, including the photos I started out with, that didn’t make the final cut because they weren’t clearly relevant. I know you can argue that anything is relevant to a narrative if you zoom out far enough, but a story has to have a scope. I don’t think a tell-all is actually a real thing!
ST: Aside from a select few first names, most of the people you reference in Without Her are listed only by an initial. Why did you choose to redact names?
RS: It wasn’t about protecting identities, because I wasn’t implicating anyone in anything. I knew I wouldn’t be giving most of the people who appear in the text the space on the page that they deserved. I wanted to indicate that we weren’t going to spend a lot of time with them and they weren’t going to be fully fleshed out characters. Except for J, who has a really big role, but that was maybe a little more protective. We’re still friends, and I wanted him to be able to have space from the story if or when he wanted it. It came from a place of respect.
ST: It’s interesting you should bring up respect, because that’s a source of tension at one point in your book: In a scene following your sister’s death, you get scolded by your family’s rabbi for talking back to your father. He reminds you that your father “didn’t do anything wrong—everyone here is hurting,” but that negates your hurt. In your opinion, who gets to tell us how to grieve when grieving and loss are subjective and highly personal?
RS: I love that you picked up on that, I feel very validated! It was just so shocking to me, it was the last thing I ever expected him to say. I don’t think anyone gets to tell another person what’s okay when it comes to grief. It’s helpful to have reminders from people about what someone else who is close to a loss might be going through—I still think about a letter I received shortly after Emily’s death from someone I went to college with who had also lost a sibling. She offered me the insight that my mother was likely suffering in ways I couldn’t comprehend. It’s so easy to get stuck in your own experience of grief and your own pain. I was quicker to be indignant than I was to be empathetic, and anything involving my parents added a whole other layer of complication. All of which is to say that it can be helpful when people offer outside perspectives. But I don’t think judgment or unsolicited directions or advice are useful. Grief is hard enough, and shame doesn’t need to be piled onto it if that can be avoided. The twist in this is that if you’re doing harm, it’s probably useful to be called out or called in . . . but maybe not two days after someone has died. No one is in their right mind at that point, and I think almost anything is forgivable. Or else maybe forgettable.
ST: To protect your emotional well-being, how did you maintain boundaries between your writing and personal life? Were there moments when you had to step away from the writing process to take care of yourself?
RS: I’ve said this before and I stand by it: I couldn’t have gotten through the writing of this book without being in therapy. For the first half of the nearly ten-year writing process, there wasn’t a very clear boundary between my writing and personal life.
I was steeped in my grief—in part just because that’s what was happening to me, and in part because I had taken on this project that I became very dedicated to. The writing and the pain fed off of each other. After five years, I was just like I’m done with this, I am ready to move on with my life. But then I had to keep working on the book for another four-and-a-half years. Every time I thought that I was done writing and then had to go back and continue to work on the text, it was devastating because to do so was incredibly draining and emotionally taxing.
Running helped for a while. What I most needed to get myself through the process of writing this was solitude. It was helpful to not have to interact with anyone else so that I could transport myself back to the mental and emotional place that I needed to be in in order to write and then find my way out of it again. I needed time to reintegrate my interior life with my life outside of the book.
ST: How did you navigate writing about feelings of guilt? Did this provide any respite or new understanding?
RS: When guilt came up, I tried to stay with it and explore it and see what else it pulled at, what was attached to it. What comes to mind is a moment when I was rereading some of Emily’s diaries. All I could see was this record of how mean I had been to her, and that crushed me because I couldn’t apologize to her and because she wasn’t okay in spite of what I’d done. My physical response to those feelings—how I buried my head in my hands—became part of the book. So I’m not sure, really, how I navigated writing about feelings of guilt except by including them without making excuses for or judging myself. That part, I think, is where respite comes in: I acknowledged my guilt, then I had to write the next sentence. I couldn’t get stuck in it.
ST: Which books or writers have served as guiding voices as you were working?
RS: There are so many books that I don’t know if I could list them all! I always had this project in my head, so I was making connections with almost everything I read. I was looking for what other writers were doing that could be helpful to me, that I could steal . . . well, borrow. . . .
ST: Oh no, we totally steal.
RS: We really do! I teach my students that too. So what could I steal, but also what could I learn. My own book was my filter, the lens through which I was viewing and interacting with everything around me. Specific books and writers that stick out in my memory are The Guardians by Sarah Manguso, which is one of my epigraphs, The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham, All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, which is about sisters, one of whom is suicidal, Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward, even though I read it before I started writing, all of Maggie Nelson’s books, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong, Boy Erased by Garrard Conley, Bandit by Molly Brodak, and many books of poetry, including Black Aperture by Matt Rasmussen.
ST: Did you develop any writing rituals or practices while working on this project?
RS: I had two playlists that I’d listen to while I wrote. The first one was called “Writing.” Eventually, I needed a different energy, so I made a playlist called “New Writing.” And sometimes I lit candles. But I didn’t do five a.m. wakeups or anything. I just needed utter solitude. During grad school I lived in an apartment with two roommates, and I had a big room with its own bathroom. I would turn on my white noise machine and put in my headphones and not come out of my room for as long as possible. I also spent time at my grandmother’s beach house during the off-season, when it was empty. I would go there by myself for anywhere from two days to a week and drink a lot of tea. It was my own makeshift writing residency. And before our son was born, my partner would kindly disappear so I could be alone in our house and write. So, no real rituals, just trying to find and take as much space as I could.
ST: Having found numerous access points and triggers to memory, what guidance might you offer to others endeavoring to craft a memoir as they search for their own mental portals?
RS: Dig through everything, and even if it feels scary, ask other people to share their memories with you. You don’t have to seek out specific memories, though some people like more guidance than others. Ask, “What do you remember from this time in your life?” And record conversations whenever possible, because when someone is sharing memories or feelings, whether they’re difficult or not, it’s important to be present and to ask more questions, to see where their memory leads you or what it leads you to. It’s helpful to listen and engage in conversation without worrying about trying to recall every word or detail. Also, comb social media, and spend time with whatever home videos and family photo albums and old school projects and notes and letters and boxes of random stuff you can find. Google Maps is also useful, and so are weather records.
ST: In one of the final chapters, you write: “When I’d daydreamed about going back to school to write, I had no sense of how draining this book would be—how much it would hurt to keep prying at the knots of a tight, tangled line of time, emotion, memory. I wished I could stop, wished I’d never started writing at all.” How do you feel about letting this story float into the hands and minds of others?
RS: Grateful. Scared, but grateful. The idea was always that the writing I was doing was going to be useful to someone else in some way, and that was what kept me going. I’ve been with it for so long, and to be able to share it gives it so much more meaning. It’s scary to lose control over a narrative and to hand it over to people to make of it what they will, but I try to trust readers.
ST: Okay, last question: “Survival”—a noun, a state of achievement or overcoming something previously unimaginable—is often confused for “surviving,” a verb, an ongoing state of being. What does it mean to you, to be someone surviving?
RS: I think often about how it is incomprehensible that we wake up every day and try things again. Surviving is, in a really primal way, just staying alive, and anything on top of that is amazing . . . it’s so hard to just be alive in the world. It’s being human, and that’s what’s unsettling about suicide: suddenly someone is able to override that instinct to keep going. Surviving is what we’re programmed to do, even when things are shitty.
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Stephanie Trott’s writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Boiler, F(r)iction, and elsewhere. Originally from New Jersey, she is managing editor of The Rumpus and lives with her wife in Massachusetts. Read more at sctrott.com.