Loving the Dead and Gone by Judith Turner-Yamamoto explores the themes of grief, loneliness, love, and ultimately endurance and redemption. Set in the 1960s in a small southern town, the author weaves two women’s stories together with grace and dignity, slowly leading the reader to a deeper understanding of how loss shapes us.
A freak car crash ignites a story about the secrets, passions, and longings of Aurilla and Darlene, two women of different generations and with different ways of coping with their grief. But though their stories are the primary ones, Turner-Yamamoto draws readers gorgeous portraits of the secondary characters. You can see Aurilla’s daughter, the little man who owns the variety store, and Clayton–even Fifi the dog has personality.
The author does the same with the setting. The small North Carolina town becomes a hauntingly familiar place where life revolves around farming and working at the hosiery mill. Turner-Yamamoto’s descriptions are so poetic and vivid you can smell the earth and hear the splash of a rock skipping across water.
The novel is Turner-Yamamoto’s debut, which amazed me considering the excellence of the writing, her success with richly developing the characters, and her ability to create the atmosphere of a small southern town in the ’60s. When she responded to my questions, it was clear she is a thoughtful, deliberate writer. She wrote the novel–which Regal House Publishing releases today!–over the course of thirty years. You can order your copy here.
Q. Why did you write this book?
A. I can’t say there is a why. The novel found seed in my first memory, a tragic family death, the specifics of which, I would only learn as an adult and after writing this novel were the fiction of a three-year-old shaped by the character of my childhood and all that came after. But my seventeen-year-old aunt, widowed by a car accident and locked in my grandparents’ bathroom, wailing this ungodly lament, I can still hear her, and I can see my uncle in his casket. These memories conflated with later parental infidelities to become Loving the Dead and Gone.
I found in writing Loving the Dead and Gone that exploring family stories and accessing the inner life of a character can explain someone from your history. Exploring the characters’ internal dialogue became a way for me to better understand the family members and traumas that shaped my early life.
I created an infidelity that felt compelled into being by tragic events, and a brutal hard-as-nails maternal grandmother not unlike my own, but this one, we come to learn, has ample reason for her meanness. I wanted to free someone from the strictures of the accident of birth and that became Darlene, the seventeen-year-old widow, who was headstrong and impulsive enough to escape the gravitational pull of place. For the young character, Emogene, I wanted in particular to give her an advocate, someone who was looking out for her interests, something absent from my own experience.
I did not have an easy relationship with where I grew up. It was a place I was always trying to escape, first through the magic of books which showed me another world. The limits of very small towns, especially southern ones, can be incredibly crushing, and especially so for the questioning and intellectually curious. All this was confounded by an absent father and a boundary-less narcissistic mother, their tumultuous relationship and infidelities, and having adulthood foisted upon me at an early age.
But when I first began to write fiction—it was in a class at Georgetown University with the amazing Shirley Cochrane, who coincidentally, was a fellow North Carolinian, I found myself right back in the little store up the road from my paternal grandparents’ farm that was owned by a little person and his wife. My father wasn’t around much when I was growing up, but I do have this generalized memory of going with him from the summer heat into the cool darkness of that store –those sense memories again– and the unspoken strangeness of it all, broken only by the sweating Brownie drinks pulled from the drink box and a salty pack of Nabs—the ubiquitous Southern cheese crackers with peanut butter sandwiched in the middle.
I wrote a scene for Shirley’s class set in that store and it was the beginning of everything. She encouraged me to keep going with this insular/ and unique place where I’d again found myself.
Q. What was the most rewarding aspect to writing it?
A. I’ll have to go with writing process: the fictive dream, the pure stuff. When I write, I literarily watch a film and hear voices. Characters speak to me and demand I tell their stories.
Q. Did anything change drastically from your first draft to the final version?
A. With five rewrites over a thirty+ year period there are going to be big changes, just as there were for the author, and you bring those new insights to each draft. This work began as a series of interconnected short stories. Kelly Cherry read that version when I was a fellow at the Duke Writers Conference. She told me it felt like it was happening in a closet, that I needed to build a world around the stories and I followed that advice. I played for years with who would speak first and from what point in time as there are dual timelines. It was Margot Livesey at Sewanee Writers Conference where I was a scholar who advised me to begin with Clayton and his discovery of the tragedy and let everything unfurl emotionally from there. Donald Ray’s death is the ripple in the proverbial pond that upends the lives of these characters.
Q. What do you hope is the take-away for readers?
A. Like Anne Tyler, I’m interested in how people endure. There is solace in entering the minds of others. It’s my hope that a reader will find the book when they need it, even if they don’t realize that until they’ve entered the universe of the book.
What questions do you have about the book now that you’ve caught a glimpse into the author’s psyche?