In this special Behind the Story post, author Yewande Omotoso takes us into the inspiration behind her powerful novel An Unusual Grief. She reflects on the themes that moved her to write the book and the personal questions that shaped its journey.
I can seldom point to one thing when it comes to this question of inspiration. Writing isn’t an event, for me, it’s always a brewing that draws on so much. An Unusual Grief started from a few desires. I’ve always wanted to write about grief. My mother died of cancer when I was 23 and that seems to have emblazoned itself onto my psyche and certainly on my writerly leanings which always – unapologetically – seem tinged with that sadness. Writing about a daughter losing her mother just felt too biographically accurate when I wasn’t looking for such a project. I decided to flip the scenario – what if I died and my mother grieved. I’ve always been haunted by the experience of packing up my childhood home after my mother died and my father, now living in another city, decided to sell the home. I found so many precious things during that time, many belonging to my mother, some things I understood but some of what she left behind felt encrypted. And so, another question that spurred my writing AUG was – if she mourned me and went through my things what would my mother find and what would she make of them? I love this idea of the coded meaning imbued in our possessions; the ways we interpret what we own (what we’ve kept) and how others do the same, and the gap between the different understandings.
My last concern with the book – at least at the stage of inception – was, can grief titillate, not only in obvious sexual ways but really in terms of deep life force. In the story Mojisola is grieving the death of her adult estranged daughter, Yinka, who takes her own life early in the story. The grief is crippling but I wanted to check if grief could also restore. Mojisola, before her child’s death, is dead herself, deadened. It is the tragic loss that wakes her up. I always feel that my mother’s death woke me up. If, up until that point I’d been a bit distracted, afterwards I was now paying attention.
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