Writing About Death Made Me a Better Author and Mother
By Katelyn Monroe Howes
My novel, The Awoken, is all about death. Through my main character Alabine, I question what it means if there’s no hope of an afterlife and death really is the end—a giant vacuum of nothingness. Alabine dies of cancer at 23, and in her death, she experiences only darkness. She’s brought back to life a century later, having cryogenically preserved her body, but she’s haunted by the nothingness she saw in death.
While writing the novel, I lived, breathed, and dreamed about what it was to die, to be dead. Further fueling my death dreams was the 24-hour pandemic news cycle of early 2020. My neighbor was one of Covid’s early victims. Death was close—too close.
Being steeped in death might’ve seemed to suit me since I was, and still am, a black eyeliner-wearing, emo music kind of gal, but there was a tiny complication: my eight-pound, 21 and three-quarter inch newborn son. He was born at the end of February 2020, less than two weeks before the declaration of a global pandemic. Trying to be a new mom in the midst of writing about death and simultaneously fearing a plague was crippling. I didn’t know how to live in both worlds: one full of death and fear, one filled with my son’s giggles and new life.
To add to the messiness that was my postpartum emotional swamp, my father-in-law, Jay, died only four days after my son was born. He lost his short and devastating battle with cancer as I wrote a novel about the very same thing. Although I started writing this story about a young woman dying of cancer long before Jay received his diagnosis, Jay’s journey to death impacted both my writing and my journey of bringing new life into this world.
Jay was told he had lung cancer within days of my seeing that little pink line on a pregnancy test. Over the following months, as my belly swelled with the life of my first child, Jay slowly thinned and morphed into a shadow of his former self, hating every moment of it. As I was puking from the surge of hormones in my body, Jay was puking from the medicinal poison flowing through his. Jay and I talked a lot about our similar symptoms. We were both scared of what was coming next.
In my third trimester, I stopped writing my book. I was far from done with it, but I knew I had nothing else to give it in my current state. So I focused on my other work and let it sit at the bottom of the proverbial drawer that was my computer desktop, not yet worthy of its own dedicated spot in my “writing” folder. Alabine’s death had to wait at least until I had finished bringing my son into this world.
The fissure that crippled my writing only widened after my son’s birth and as the pandemic progressed.
Trying to be a new mom in the midst of writing about death and simultaneously fearing a plague was crippling. I didn’t know how to live in both worlds: one full of death and fear, one filled with my son’s giggles and new life.
And then Jay died.
For the next few months, I was living in two extremes. My husband even more so as he tried to understand our new reality. At some point, I asked my doula how we could grieve Jay’s death and make sense of a global pandemic while also celebrating our son’s new life. She tried to give me some comfort and wisdom, but I could see in her fidgeting eyes that she was just as scared as I.
I tried going back to writing, remembering that my pre-pregnant self swore up and down that motherhood wouldn’t derail my career. But the words still wouldn’t come. I’d try writing while my baby napped, but instead stared at a blank page until I eventually ended up watching more news. I wondered through tears if my baby would ever meet his family. Everything felt too close, too painful to choose to write about dying young.
So I looked away from my computer to my perfect baby boy. I loved being a newborn mom. I loved that I had never felt so close to another person in my life, barely able to tell where he ended and I began. I loved the safe bubble I had so carefully constructed. I felt like I was glowing and walking an inch off the ground. Of course, there were tears and fears and it was hard, but all of that just added to this out-of-body euphoric experience I was having. Death had no place inside my bubble.
That summer, I decided to try to sell my partial manuscript. Thankfully it found a great home at Dutton, and then there was no choice: I had to get back to writing, whether or not I felt like inviting death into my bubble.
One seemingly not-so-special day, my five-month-old didn’t want to nap. Instead, he wanted to stare up at my face while I held him. I soon realized he didn’t care if I stared back, so I took out my computer and started writing, my son squeezed between my laptop and my belly. A flood of death and hate and tragedy rushed through me, as if a dam had broken and I was allowed to safely surf the ensuing tidal wave. It was as if my baby’s little body protected mine. He was stronger than I knew.
By finding my writing again, I also became a more confident mother. Except for neighborhood walks, we had barely left the house in months. But now I had found the courage to get out and take him to the beach or a picnic at the park. He loved every minute—my little social butterfly I didn’t even know I had.
Even more, through his laughter, I found the hope in my otherwise dark novel, the hope in death and Alabine’s story. I even found hope in Jay’s death, seeing the stories we tell my son of Jay’s life as a special kind of afterlife. Two years later, I received a blurb for my book from New York Times bestselling author David Yoon. His endorsement described the death and drama, twists and turns that permeate my book but he ended it with “a flickering of hope as our guide.” I almost cried on the spot. That was my son, his indelible and undeniable imprint on the novel that grew up alongside him, allowing me to become a better author, and mother, in the process.
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Katelyn Monroe Howes is an LA-based, award-winning writer and Emmy- nominated documentarian. An Atlanta native and alum of NYU, Katelyn cofounded 1/27 Pictures, a documentary production company. Her work often tackles systemic inequities and combats uninformed bias as she strives to tell stories that upend the status quo. Her debut novel The Awoken was published in August and has been optioned by Keshet Studios to be adapted for television.