Grief is senseless.
When I sat down with author Amy B. Scher to discuss her upcoming young adult novel, “The Unexpected Afterlife of Salon Rose,” one phrase synthesized the affirmation you get from reading the novel: You don’t have to make sense of loss in order to heal.
Through fiction, readers can set aside their own trauma to explore someone else’s in a safe environment. Scher, an emotional therapy healing expert, knows that better than anyone. Her cousin Pam Schmidt was murdered at 22, just five days after her father died.
Pam had planned to attend his memorial service.
The night before Pam was killed, she left Scher a message asking to talk and “run something” by her. Because of timing and distance, they planned to speak the next day.
Scher never learned what Pam wanted to discuss.
“The book really came from after my period of very intense grief, being like, I’m doing this falling apart (and) I wonder what she’s doing,” Scher said with a laugh. “She’s got to be doing something. And I started to sort of imagine my conversations with Pam and how she would be on the other side and be like, ‘What the (expletive)?!’”
Processing grief – something everyone has or will likely experience in their lifetime – is central to Scher’s work. But while the experience is universal, the navigation is individual.
“Bibliotherapy” has been proven to help those experiencing emotional distress and is preferable to no treatment at all. Fiction, specifically, has also been said to relieve stress and anxiety.
“It’s important to know that grief is a full-body experience,” Gina Moffa, a licensed clinical social worker and a grief and trauma therapist in New York, told USA TODAY. “Fiction slips past our defenses because we think we’re watching someone else’s life. You cry for a character and realize you’re crying for yourself. Without knowing it, the story itself becomes a kind of container that is strong enough to hold a feeling (or a lot of them) that you couldn’t really approach or confront head-on.”
While the story of her titular character Salon Rose isn’t a retelling of Pam’s story, it’s inevitable to feel her presence – and charm.
Earlier versions adhered more closely to the facts of what happened to Pam. Scher eventually found that sticking to those facts kept her emotionally stuck. Creating a fictional world allowed her to imagine how Pam might have experienced the afterlife. Through an afterlife support group, Salon Rose tries to figure out her own murder before moving on to the great unknown.
In real life, knowing the answers to all the questions about loss, or telling yourself someone is “in a better place” doesn’t make it hurt less, according to Scher. “So, all of our coping skills and our mechanism of rationalizing something doesn’t work to lessen the pain. And the only way to get through it is to decide and make peace with the fact that it probably won’t make sense and that that’s OK.”
While bibliotherapy isn’t a substitute for mental health therapy and other treatments, experts agree that it can help in a holistic approach.
“Fiction can support our healing when it dramatizes complexity, instead of just delivering lessons,” Moffa said. When readers identify with a grieving character, something called “narrative transportation” can occur, blurring the line between reader and story. “This can help people process emotions, see their reactions as normal and find words for what they feel. But real grief doesn’t follow a neatly planned plot, and expecting it to can make you feel like you’re falling short.”
Moffa, who’s the author of “Moving On Doesn’t Mean Letting Go: A Modern Guide to Navigating Loss,” has a two-prong approach:
- Continue. If you finish a chapter more able to name and allow what you feel and are more willing to talk about the loss out loud, plus invite in different parts of life again, it’s working.
- Stop. If your reading replaces connection and keeps you isolated, as well as if the grief itself feels bottomless, rather than beginning to come in waves. Also stop if sleep or appetite start slipping in one direction or another that leaves you weak and worn down, or the story becomes the only place your grief is allowed to exist.
Is there a happy ending?
A happily ever after is in the eye of the beholder. A prescient message throughout Salon’s novel is that accepting grief as a part of life is just as powerful as “healing.”
“Stories that let contradiction stand … are doing something closer to the truth,” Moffa said. “They give readers permission through mirroring rather than instruction: Here is a person who is still a mess and still whole.”
Through Scher’s own mental health work with teenagers, including queer youths and those without easy access to support, she has seen how isolation can intensify emotional pain.
Scher herself carried guilt and questions about that missed conversation with Pam for years. Salon’s story helped her accept that learning what Pam wanted to tell her might not have changed the outcome. It might only have created a different form of guilt.
With “The Unexpected Afterlife of Salon Rose,” Scher managed to craft a lighthearted companion for anyone suffering through loss.
Josh Rivera is an author and senior editor at USA TODAY. You can follow him on Threads or Substack.