Sarah Perry is the author of the memoir After the Eclipse, which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Poets & Writers Notable Nonfiction Debut, and a Barnes & Noble Discover pick. Perry is the recipient of the 2018 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award and was a nominee for the 2024 MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University and teaches in the graduate program in creative writing at Colorado State University.
When I first heard Sarah Perry’s name, I was in the first year of my MFA program, beginning to write a memoir about the night my grandmother was murdered in the home we shared when I was fifteen. I was overwhelmed with legal documents, trial transcripts, and police reports, just learning how to put the pieces together and make sense of them on the page. My professors kept saying, “You’ve got to talk to Sarah Perry.” She was a few years ahead of me in the program, having just sold her memoir, After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Search, about the night her mother was murdered when Sarah was twelve. Eventually, we became friends, having the kinds of natural, honest conversations we’d never been able to have with other people. We’re members of a club no one wants to be in—where we recognize that even the idea of being interviewed can be fraught.
Centering the unique experience of the survivor-witness, Sarah’s memoir troubles the expectations—and the fetishization—of the true crime genre. Her second book, Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover, is a colorful collection of essays about candy, nostalgia, and leaning into pleasure. In celebration of Sweet Nothings, we sat down to talk about Sarah’s writing process, moving on from the murder memoir, and finding joy in the grief
Kristi D. Osorio: Crime survivors are often pigeonholed into thinking death and violence are the only things we’re allowed to write about, and yet, you have written a beautiful, funny, vibrant book about… candy! How did you conceive of the idea for this book, and which candy came first?
Sarah Perry: After the memoir came out, I took a year to recover, and then I started writing a sequel memoir about sexuality and love and dating in the wake of trauma. It was still dark and difficult, and I was feeling that weight of writing against true crime narratives and narratives about survivors and justice. There’s so much tension in pushing against those boulders. I was extremely tired. My partner told me that I should write about candy because I have the world’s biggest sweet tooth. I wanted to rehabilitate my own relationship with writing and enjoy writing sentences again, so I decided to get up every day for a hundred days and write about a different kind of candy each day. I would start writing before the coffee was in my head, before the editor within me was awake. The first one I wrote was strawberry Rip Rolls. It was such a positive journey of writing into what’s preoccupying you and committing to it, and not thinking about what it’s going to be.
KDO: There’s that pressure about what you’re supposed to do when The Book About The Horrible Thing is done. What I love about Sweet Nothings is that there’s a real sense of freedom. It comes across in your tone and even in the book’s clever title, too—a sort of lightness. There were times when I was reading it and I was just laughing, and then I started crying because I was so happy to be laughing at what you wrote. I loved thinking of you having fun writing.
SP: I gave myself a lot of permission and I surprised myself a lot. I was definitely not used to making people laugh with my writing. I was used to being nervous that I was re-traumatizing people in the room or being nervous that I was commodifying my own pain and people were avaricious about it or making people cry and being like, “We’re having a really in-depth human experience, and that’s beautiful, but that’s a lot to hold.” But with this book, people can just laugh at what a ridiculous human I am about this subject, and I love that.
KDO: Even when you reflect on some of the darker topics and painful memories, there is a light, conversational element, a kind of intimacy you achieve through humor and wit throughout. How did you establish that narrative voice?
SP: It’s funny to me to have written this book and still be able to say, “I don’t actually know how to be funny on the page.” I could not teach somebody how to do it. I think I just love candy so much that writing about it made me happy. Phillip Lopate talks about that attitude of self-amusement in essay writing. One thing my agent liked in the manuscript was that it’s really connected to sensory experience. It’s about noise and taste and smell and a body, an object. It’s not overwhelmed by abstractions, and that’s really satisfying. Some of the jokes and asides just came out of legitimate obsession. I wanted to enjoy things on the level of the sentence, and enjoying the rhythm of making a sentence was a real driver for me. I would write a sentence and feel my way through it, through how it sounded. Then I’d write the next sentence in a very instinctive way, not a designed way. Writing about something I’m obsessed with gave it that kind of looseness.
KDO: I did appreciate those times where you kind of gave us the history of the candy, too, though. It made me think of the hot dog meme, how people think that’s all essayists do.
SP: Oh God, I hope it’s not as clumsy as the hot dog meme! For writers it is kind of an Easter egg or a tongue-in-cheek sendup of that sort of thing, especially in my Brach’s Milk Maid Caramels essay. But I mostly wrote them out in my head. I wanted to follow what came up out of my subconscious, rather than be led by the nose. Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies is like that. He wrote all of those essays, which he calls Essays Near Knowing, just out of his head, and if he did research later, it’s in a corrections section in the back of the book. I did go in and fact check myself, so there was this later round that I called “essaying them out.” I made some of them less diaristic than they had been and layered in a little more depth and heft. For some, I went completely down the rabbit hole and could not stop researching, which was fun and nerdy.
KDO: Some of these essays are longer, and others feel almost like prose poems—lyrical, colorful, tender portraits of intimate moments, some between you and your mother, some between you and friends or partners. Can you tell us about your decision-making process when switching between lengths, as well as organizing the essays?
SP: At some point I was telling people that I was writing about candy, so they gave me candy and I would write about that, which I didn’t anticipate. It was an awesome side effect. For the ones that came out short, I generally just kept them short in that process of essaying it out. Then some of them got researched, so they got longer. The first manuscript was organized by candy color, so I made color coded note cards to think further about that sequencing. I had two rounds of re-sequencing them—tearing the manuscript apart and putting it back together. I’ve never put together a collection of several small things, and I thought readers would want a story, so I would think, where are there some autobiographical stories to follow? So, on top of the color coded note cards, I had color coded stickers for narrative lines the reader could follow through the various essays. Or, I would think, I don’t want two big research-heavy essays next to each other, so where can I change the rhythm? The essays with Mom had a certain color sticker, so I could see what sections she appeared in and decide if there was a rough narrative line to follow.
This is also about narrative expectations of people who have experienced traumatic and violent things. We still get to be humans who enjoy things and are not necessarily centering our professional and creative lives around that one Thing. Obviously, Mom is still in the book, which is touching and frustrating to me at the same time. But, as you said, it’s a very different tone. There was this paradox built into After the Eclipse in that I had been really determined from the outset from when Mom died. I was obsessed with not becoming “a statistic.” I didn’t want the path of my life to be predetermined by this violent thing. I lived in such a small town, and then I was happy to get away from everybody defining me by the Thing. But then I wrote this book that is all about the Thing, and then I’m giving a job talk about Mom getting killed. I’m fully in again and fully conspiring in that self-definition that’s all about the trauma. I’m glad that this book can undo some of that work—or live alongside it.
KDO: I wonder if you’re comfortable with leaning into something you mentioned: that your mom being in the collection is touching but frustrating. I’m thinking about what it looks like to “move on” from writing about the Thing. Because it’s still always there. It’s always part of you. It’s hard to talk about the way that you experience love or the way you see friendship or even how you enjoy candy without it being colored by the Thing. Can we talk about that?
SP: I have so many things to say. One is that I have irrational embarrassment. Like, that people are going to say, “She only has one thing she can write about,” that they’re going to judge me. It’s about vulnerability, too. It’s so exposing. And what if people get sick of hearing this? There’s a writing concern and a personal concern, because I wonder, “Am I able to make meaning of anything without this primary wound?” It feels like a lack of imagination to not be able to, and it feels kind of intellectually lazy, and it feels kind of bleak. But if we are able to make something beautiful and make use of these experiences, then why wouldn’t you do that all the time, if it’s within your capacity? I want to hear you talk about this, too.
KDO: Sometimes I want to write an essay about something I’ve never written about before, just something I enjoy or obsess over, but I always end up writing about the murder. Going through what we did at the ages we did, it shaped how we see the world, right? Sometimes I want to write about other things without having to give that context, but it is the context. That’s something I’ve really loved in your book: you offer one to two sentences here or there, giving the context from the first book, and move on. The world doesn’t really let us do that most of the time. I like to use something a colleague once said to me in workshop as a metaphor. They said, “I really want you to go back to the bloody mattress. Can you slow down and write about that more?” So, most of the time, we don’t get permission to give the context we want and move on. We always have to give them the bloody mattress. I loved getting to see you free yourself from those expectations.
A recurring move I’m struck by is your use of second person in some scenes. There are several instances of this, but one of my favorites is in the Luden’s essay, when you write, “If you had a halfway decent childhood, your mom kept these around for your recurrent kiddo colds… Is it too sentimental to say that the medicine you were getting was your mom’s love?” In moments like this, you not only get to reclaim your mother’s identity as a whole person who is not just a “victim,” but you also invoke the reader’s own mother and their relationship to candy. When you have a lived experience that others may think of as the stuff of movies or fiction, it can be hard for readers to relate, but here, candy becomes this portal to normalcy, this common ground. I’m wondering if you could talk about that movement toward the second person.
SP: I think that comes out of building that conversational tone. I didn’t do it on purpose, but I can see the connections you’re making and that it normalizes Mom as a mom. There’s so much about this book that was just out of instinct and subconsciousness. I’ve thought about Eclipse backwards and forwards and inside out, and back then I was intentionally going for specific effects and arguments. With this book, a lot of it just happened on its own.
KDO: In “Chewy Reds,” you talk about seeing Interview with the Vampire and eating Swedish Fish with your mother. Soon after, you say, “My mind bent time to make all this happen: Interview with the Vampire didn’t come out until six months after Mom died.” Nostalgia permeates the book, and in this moment, you’re nostalgic for a time that never happened. The form of the personal essay demands that we mine our memory, but the reality of the trauma survivor is that often our ability to remember is complicated and imperfect. Can you talk about that tension?
SP: I’m in the camp of showing the seams and interpreting the mis-memory. When I drafted that one, I didn’t know that it was wrong. I found out later when I was researching. It’s so interesting to think about, well, why was the mis-memory there? I really did have this sensation of her. It’s probably still true that there are times when I have the sensation of her being with me, but I’m not consciously aware of that. So actually misremembering it and then discovering that I misremembered it, and then thinking about that led me to this beautiful realization. Trauma does mess up your timelines and memory, but I think memory is also such a cliche in creative nonfiction. It’s unreliable. It’s fallible. What can either drive you crazy or be really useful is to think, would this have been messed up and inaccurate anyway? Or did it happen because of the big thing? Your whole life is an endless question of, is this because of the big thing?
KDO: You reminded me about a part in the book, that I think is mentioned in more detail in After the Eclipse, about getting interrogated by police. You wrote: “I said, ‘I don’t know,’ 42 times in response to essentially the same query.” I can relate to that so much in terms of my own interrogations, but also in thinking about the cliché of memory in the nonfiction genre. There are these expectations to remember it perfectly so you can render it perfectly, right?
SP: As a memoirist, you want to dig in and you want to know more. You want to inhabit your memories. You want to come to these more embodied experiences and learn more. And a lot of people would never do this work because they want to maintain things and people as they remember them.
KDO: Right. It would be easier that way! To close out, I want to talk about the ongoing thread in the book about experiencing pleasure in spite of pain and loss. My favorite candy you write about is Lindor chocolate balls, because I used to eat those with my grandma. When she was killed, I couldn’t enjoy them, always struggling with the grief and guilt of, “Why should I get to eat this, knowing she’ll never eat them again?” After reading your book, I decided to indulge again, and it made me feel present with her memory in a new way that wasn’t painful or scary. I thought of your line in the Blow Pops essay, “Sweetness as survival,” and giving yourself permission to experience pleasure. I wonder if we could end by talking about joy. What were some of the pleasures of stepping into this new mode, of moving on from your memoir into writing about food, friendship, romantic love, sexuality, and getting to honor your mother in a different way?
SP: Wow, now we’re both crying. I’m so glad you got those Lindor balls. Thank you for doing that. I feel like it’s communion among all of us, which was one reason I wanted the candies to be really accessible candies. I wanted people to have had those experiences. My first instinct is to say, Mom would be super happy. Mom would be so happy to know that I have found a way to focus on joy and happiness and pleasure, even in my writing, which has previously been so fraught and serious. I think she would’ve been thrilled that I wrote Eclipse. When I hesitate about monetizing anything, I say to myself, “Mom would want you to support yourself, and she would want you to have money and be able to do things. If a representation of her is what gave you that, she would be happy.” I think she would be even happier to see that I can write about lighter things, about joy. Growing up, I took everything personally and was very serious to a fault. I got in my own way and was unhappy because I couldn’t just exist. In the book, I write about the McDonald’s ball pit. I can’t just be in the ball pit, because I’m thinking about what happiness needs to be performed. Mom did not have that. She knew how to enjoy things. She knew how to relax when she was relaxed. I think she would be amused and pleased that I am learning how to do that.
Kristi D. Osorio is a writer, editor, and educator based in Texas. In 2023, she was the winner of the Indiana Review Creative Nonfiction Prize selected by Camonghne Felix and the Sonora Review “Mercy” Contest in Nonfiction selected by Maggie Nelson. Her writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from Columbia University, Wesleyan University, and the Kenyon Review. She is an Assistant Professor of Practice at Texas Tech University. Her first book is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.