A Review of Amy Lin’s Here After (Zibby, 2024)

[uttararangarajan]

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

There’s a couple of new presses that have come out with the name Z at the beginning. There’s Zando and then there is Zibby! Zibby has already impressed with its initial slate of books, and Amy Lin’s Here After (Zibby, 2024) is a testament to the incredible acquisitional and editorial work that their team is doing. What a GUT PUNCH this memoir is. You’ll see why after you read the marketing description: “Amy Lin never expected to find a love like the one she shares with her husband, Kurtis, a gifted young architect who pulls her toward joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. But on a sweltering August morning, only a few months shy of the newlyweds' move to Vancouver, thirty-two-year-old Kurtis heads out to run a half-marathon with Amy's family. It is the last time she sees her husband alive. Ten days after this seismic loss, Amy is in the hospital, navigating her own shocking medical crisis and making life-or-death decisions about her treatment. What follows is a rich and unflinchingly honest accounting of her life with Kurtis, the vortex created by his death, and the ongoing struggle Amy faces as she attempts to understand her own experience in the context of commonly held ‘truths’ about what the grieving process looks like. Here After is a love story and a meditation on the ways in which Kurtis' death shatters any set ideas Amy ever held about grief, strength, and memory. Its power will last with you long after the final page.”

 

As I continue the memoir kick I’m on and as I toggle back and forth between fiction and creative nonfiction (maybe it’s finally time to add in some more poetry? Drama?), I have seen Lin’s work get more and more publicity. It follows in the tradition of works like Zauner’s Crying in H Mart in the way that it so totally embraces the profound complications of bereavement. What I especially loved is the use of white space throughout this text. Chapters are really snippets that read like prose poetry, and the white space that surrounds each block begins to accrue a kind of emotional intensity that perhaps helps to mirror that sense of loss — one that most of us can’t even begin to imagine — that has befallen the author. The medical crisis that Lin must navigate on her own are a very dangerous series of clots that require a stent to be put into her body. Without that stent, she may end up having a life-threatening or life-ending stroke. As you might expect, Lin is ambivalent about getting the stent: after all, what is there to live for now that Kurtis is gone? Despite such ideations, Lin also knows that she must find a way to navigate the after: she goes to therapy regularly and also signs up for a new grief counselor. She also consistently meets with a fellow widow, which sometimes helps her process her unique positionality. Days stretch out, like the white blocks that surround each page, as she struggles to find the energy to do anything. Outwardly, friends and family start to assume she is doing better, but Lin knows that she is not. She eventually adopts a puppy, despite more ambivalence about whether or not she can actually care for this other living thing, which may die at any moment. What I appreciate most about Lin’s memoir is that she takes the time to dispel a lot of myths about the grieving process. There are no developmental stages of grieving, nor do projects about how bad grief will be map onto any common template. If anything, we are reminded that the cost of profound love will be catastrophic grief, but Lin also reminds us that one method to dealing with grief is in a communal process. That is, you use the tools you have in order to address grief. For Lin, to address grief is to write about it. The logical step that she may not have at first anticipated is that this writing would be the basis for a creative publication. But it all makes sense. It is Kurtis, after all, who tells Lin that she is a writer, even before Lin has published her first short story, about embracing that identity. It comes full circle with Lin’s coruscating meditation on bereavement, so we see that one way that Lin comes to honor and to grieve Kurtis is in the process of narrative reconstructions. There may be no end to grief, as Lin’s memoir reveals, but it can and should be shared.

 

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