I dealt with the particularly bad, lonely, griefy days after both of my parents' deaths by spending countless hours curled up in bed, reading. What was the point of writing about grief anymore? What was there to say about loss except that it sucked, that I was depressed and miserable and missed my father and mother and wanted them back? Even my title seemed to mock me: Cures for Heartbreak. I felt a sense of dislocation so severe I sometimes felt seasick, as if I'd stepped onto a ship's deck in a storm and couldn't find the door back inside.

Losing him only seemed to compound the grief I still felt for my mother. He was very much like the father in the book, and we'd become extremely close in the years after my mother died.ĭespite having spent ages thinking and writing about grief, despite believing I'd shone a light in every corner of the experience of losing a parent, I was devastated by his death. Then, on an August afternoon, my father died of a heart attack. Writing a story can be magical - I see things on the page that I never knew I'd felt or believed or could have imagined before.Ī couple years after I started the book, I finished the first draft. The process of re-visiting the past, altering it and shaping it into fiction helped make sense of things for me it helped take something painful and incomprehensible and turn it into something else: a story. I felt that enough years had passed since she'd died to give me some perspective on her death, for it to become digested enough to write about. It seems that many writers are drawn to personal material for their first books, and when I started writing fiction, the material that I couldn't keep away from was about my mother's death.

I wrote Cures for Heartbreak over a period of eight years, though when I started writing it I had no idea that it would take so long to finish.Ĭures for Heartbreak is a very personal story for me: the fifteen-year-old narrator, Mia Pearlman, loses her mother to melanoma days after the diagnosis, just as I did.

Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb