Sarah Yahm is a freelance writer, radio producer and educator who has been published in Slate, The Bellevue Literary Review, and NPR and its affiliates. Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation was awarded the 2024 Dzanc Prize for Fiction. The book was published in May.
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When an author writes honestly about the process of grief, an angel gets its wings.
Sarah Yahm’s Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation redefines the solemn, considerate way we are supposed to experience and talk about grief. The novel opens on Louise who, freshly out in the world following her mother’s death, takes up a determinately inappropriate conversation with a stranger named Leon at a shabbat dinner about her upbringing and the endless potentials of phallic symbols. Her cynical nature, her sexual openness, and her unresolved bitterness introduce us to someone who is the antithesis of perfection and finds herself comfortable living in the gray area that we all pretend to not inhabit. Her nontraditional and—at times—rugged personality carries on through her daughter Lydia as the book spans four decades to offer a multigenerational reading of the impact of tragedy.
My conversation with Yahm followed the story of a Jewish family whose religious identity, circumstances, and outlook on life are different from my own. As we spoke, I found myself drawing parallels in our seemingly illogical and thoroughly imperfect reactions to death. Her responses to my questions, much like her book, led me to reflect on societal conditioning, generational reverberations, and the freedom we gain when we forgo our predetermined roles.
Ann Marie Vanderveen: Your book covers complex maternal relationships and how entangled mothers and daughters can be in each other’s lives. You write, “Every step was her own morbid variation on the ‘If a tree falls in the wood’ dilemma: If a girl defines herself in opposition to her mother and her mother no longer exists, does the girl still exist?” How did your own relationship with your mother and your own relationship with your child impact how you wrote about these genetic and emotional ties?
Sarah Yahm: I wrote this book while I was simultaneously raising a young child and helping my mother figure out how to die. Unfinished Acts is a product of that impossible moment. There’s a story I tell about this one particular day when my mother was sick in bed, as she was so often during that final year. I was visiting her, sitting with her and singing her a lullaby. I’m pretty sure it was the Pete Seeger song “Hobo’s Lullaby,” which was what my dad always sang to us. I sang for hours, but eventually I needed to go home and put my daughter to bed, but my mother wouldn’t let me. She kept grabbing my hand and saying, “Don’t go, don’t go, keep singing, keep singing.” I literally had to pull my hand out of her grasp.
Then when I got home, I sang the same song to my toddler at bedtime, and she started screaming at me to go away because singing put her to sleep, and she didn’t want to go to sleep, she wanted to stay up and play. I remember leaving the room and crying because I felt like in the course of one day I had failed both my mother and my daughter with the same lullaby. I felt like I was just an empty vessel for their respective contradictory needs, like I didn’t exist in and of myself. Writing this book enabled me to feel like I existed again. Scripting my characters enabled me to script myself in a way that worked for me as I was going through this period in my life.
There was this one aberrational night when my mother was in a delusional state and didn’t know who I was. It was definitely the most disorienting moment of my life. I kept thinking: if my mother doesn’t know who I am, do I exist? She also didn’t know who she was, which seemed fitting to me. I was weirdly comforted that our identities were so entangled that to not know me, she also had to not know herself. I stayed on the phone with her for hours, narrating her to her, and me to her, telling story after story because I desperately believed that the power of our relationship would trump whatever dementia process was going on in her brain. I think in some ways, this book is a spell, or a prayer, or a wild hope that even in the face of death, there is nothing more powerful than the enduring intimacies and irritations between a mother and daughter.
AMV: Jewish culture is very prevalent throughout the book despite the main family not being religious. How is the conversation around death in the book impacted by the characters’ Jewish cultural identity? Why did you decide it was important, despite the seeming agnosticism of the characters, to include these traditions and detail specific Jewish-American experiences in the story?
SY: I really got tangled up trying to answer this question because I parse the categories of Jewish and goyish to such a degree in this book they became almost meaningless. At one point Lydia declares that there is nothing more goyish than the nation of Israel, which for the record I agree with, but is obviously counterintuitive and over the top. This book is on its face very culturally Jewish, but that’s another category that’s become almost meaningless, reduced to matzo ball soup, overbearing mothers, and the word “verklempt.”
The category that I think still has teeth is Yiddishkeit, which I would define as the residual cultural characteristics of Eastern European Jews. Eastern European Jewish populations were terrified and for good reason. They expected the worst because they often experienced it: pogroms, poverty, violence, Tsarist whims, conscription. Because they had very little control over their lives, they created a series of lay rituals in order to make themselves feel safe: salt in the pockets, red threads, naming practices, taboos, and repetitive incantations to avert the evil eye.
My characters are steeped in Yiddishkeit. They are in conversation with religious Judaism because they are surrounded by it, but they don’t practice it. Lydia literally undoes the traditional burial shroud that her mother has been wrapped in, and then reclaims her mother’s body using a syncretic mixture of Yiddishkeit (salt), Leonard Cohen (the apex of 20th century cultural Judaism), and components from their own personal meshugganah family traditions.
This book is also elementally Jewish because of its dark sense of humor. Historically oppressed peoples are often the funniest because they can’t control the shitshow that is their lives so they might as well laugh about it. But I also think this type of gallows humor is its own form of ritualistic practice, as if performing pessimism and self-deprecation can protect us from the whims of Hashem and the evil eye and the angel of death.
AMV: Beyond the humor that populates the book’s pages, there is also a striking degree of honesty. As someone who has been through multiple rounds of therapy, I feel like your book captures hard realities in a way that only a well-therapized person can (so to speak). Were there any experiences in therapy or with therapists that impacted how you developed your characters and their reactions to major life events?
SY: Both my parents were therapists, my grandmother was a therapist, every adult I knew throughout my entire childhood was a therapist with the exception of my teachers. Therapeutic language was the language of my household, and out of necessity, I became fluent pretty young.
I do think that psychoanalysis was a bit of a religion in my house. There was this mystical belief that if you found the right insight and uttered it aloud, then poof, your anxieties, neuroses, and problems would go away. My parents were pretty iconoclastic in other avenues of their lives, but they were true believers when it came to the theories of 70s psychoanalysis. And that was not great for me when I manifested the symptoms of OCD at the age of four. They really wanted to fix me and they couldn’t, and that led to great distress for all of us.
So what I did in this book was create the therapeutic modalities that I think would have helped me as a kid and then I had Leon, the father in Unfinished Acts, use those techniques with his daughter Lydia. I drew upon some of the insights and philosophies of R. D. Laing and the antipsychiatry movement of the 70s, in particular the idea of “being with” people in extreme states instead of trying to treat or cure them. In the book Leon blows soap bubbles with Lydia as she’s washing her hands compulsively at the sink, to help her feel less existentially alone and frightened. I kind of wish my parents had tried something like that with me, entered into my suffering with me instead of trying to reason me out of it. So I gave that gift to Lydia.
AMV: One chapter of the book I found fascinating addressed the often avoided topic of postpartum depression. After long days spent at home caring for the then-infant Lydia, Louise is faced with violent and compulsive thoughts about the harm she could cause her newborn. These scenes inspired a conversation between my mother and I about her own mental health struggles after my birth. How does open dialogue (whether it occurs in literature or in real life) about these challenging periods impact the societal taboos around them?
SY: Birth and death are highly scripted cultural experiences. But we rarely feel the way we’re supposed to feel during them. And when our feelings don’t match the scripts, we feel incredibly isolated and ashamed. So what I’m really trying to do with this book is speak aloud people’s strange interior experiences during these liminal times, and therefore enable other people to articulate their own. My hope is that this will help create more authentic communities of support by creating a space for honest conversation. I am so glad that reading this book created an opportunity for you to talk to your mom about her postpartum experience. That’s exactly what I want Unfinished Acts to accomplish.
Years ago, I had a therapist who used this wacky cognitive behavioral therapy technique with me to help me with my intrusive obsessive thoughts. She made me sing my anxieties out loud in a silly operatic voice, and when I did sing them, they became instantly strange. They were revealed to be ridiculous and absurd and irrational and funny. That’s kind of what I’m attempting to do by articulating these forbidden internal thoughts. When we speak them out loud, they lose their power and become absurd when we find out our worst, most terrifying thoughts are just not that special or unique. It’s incredibly liberating.
AMV: Other terminal illnesses that impact minority groups come up in the periphery of the book; we get a glimpse into the AIDS crisis, which impacts friends of Louise. Why is memorializing these crises in literature important?
SY: I was born in 1979 in the New York metropolitan area, and the cocktail drugs didn’t come out until ’96, so my entire childhood was framed by the reality of AIDS. And yet it’s barely discussed any more, just like COVID-19 is barely discussed five years later. I think that’s because we’re still an elementally Calvinist country founded upon the idea that good things happen to the deserving, and if bad things happen to you, it must be because you’re undeserving. And so most of us feel some degree of shame when we’re sick or weak or vulnerable.
But ACT UP actively rejected shame and the premise that people who are sick are in some way morally suspect. They challenged some of the most destructive and ingrained components of American society, and opened up an entirely new conversation about bodies. So many of the foundations of progressive ideology today, like sex positivity, safe sex, harm reduction, and chosen family emerged from the AIDS crisis.
I talk about AIDS in this book because it’s something that the Rosenbergs would have been thinking about and talking about, but also because the conversations that I’m trying to have about illness and disability are only possible because of ACT UP and the work that they did. This book is really about acknowledging the reality of death and disease as parts of life and the communities of care and authenticity and honesty that can emerge out of them, and that’s a message that I learned from ACT UP and the literature of AIDS. Angels in America was actually one of the most influential texts for me as a writer. In fact, as I’m writing this answer now, I’m realizing how much I owe to Tony Kushner and the conversations his characters have in that book, where they seamlessly merge the personal and the political.
AMV: You address the ugly truths of death and grief in this book, depicting awkward interactions between the dying and the grieving and the grieving and their observers. When Leon comes to Louise’s eclectic apartment after the death of her mother, you write, “He wanted to ask her what was going on in her living room. But he restrained himself because he knew there was nothing more private than the chaotic logic of grief.” What do you hope your readers take away from these conversations about grief?
SY: Grief is weird and filled with contradictions, and we need to embrace them. I intellectually don’t believe in life after death, but I definitely felt my father hanging around in the period right after he died, and just the other night I was putting my daughter to bed and I felt my mother there in the bedroom with us. It’s incoherent, it’s irrational, it’s chaotic, and it’s inconsistent, and I’m okay with that.
When it comes to death and grief, this book is really a diatribe against platitudes and euphemisms, because I think they prevent us from being authentic and getting what we need from each other. That’s why I opened up this book with Leon’s non-clichéd condolence gift: potato chips and Scotch to counteract the literal and metaphorical mush of funeral food and funeral conversation.
AMV: The book concludes with Leon contemplating (in a characteristically lighthearted way) Freud’s famous words: “Love and work . . . work and love, that’s all there is.” Why did you choose to end this tragic story with this phrase?
SY: The first line and the last line of this book are both about Freud. I enjoy the symmetry of that, and it seems right to me because even though psychoanalysis is a limited and limiting discourse, my characters are steeped in it. But also, I just love this quote. Freud is such a misogynistic schmuck, but when he’s right he’s right. It cuts through all the bullshit of keeping up with the Joneses and status and hierarchies and drills right to the heart of what makes a meaningful life. You need substantive work and substantive relationships. If you have that, your life has been successful and meaningful. I find that deeply comforting. It erases a lot of noise and self-doubt for me.
AMV: There is a thematic conflict between uncontrollable circumstance and agency throughout the book. Did writing this book make you reflect on the extent to which your life’s outcomes are predetermined, and how much agency you have in shaping them?
SY: I don’t have any agency over birth or death, but I do have agency over the role that I will play in relation to both. Here’s an example: When my mother was finally actually dying, hospice nurses kept coming in and out of her room and repeating clichés that drove me nuts. I felt like we were trapped in an ill-fitting cultural script: My sister and I were the devoted daughters and my mother was the dying matriarch. It was solemn and restrained and inauthentic and I hated it.
My mother kept repeating, “I’m trying to die and I just don’t know how. I’m trying to die and I just don’t know how,” and the nurses kept repeating inanities like, “Just let go, just let go.” After a few hours of this, I kind of lost it and decided the only way to survive this deathbed scene was to become one of my characters, to embody Louise. So the next time my mother said, “I just can’t figure out how to die,” I let loose this really loud, stinky fart and I waved the smell in her face and I said, “Here, mom, maybe this will help.” The three of us (my sister, my mother, and I) collapsed into giggles and we had a moment where we were ourselves again, not the empty roles we’d been assigned in a stupid death tableau.
I guess what I’m saying is that sometimes the only agency we have in life is a well-timed fart joke and a shared giggle in the face of death, but that’s better than nothing.