‘Grief became my brand’: Freya Bromley on writing about personal tragedy
Touring her memoir and talking to others helped the author come to terms with her brother’s death, but the book’s success left her feeling guilty
Touring her memoir and talking to others helped the author come to terms with her brother’s death, but the book’s success left her feeling guilty. Had she commodified her family’s pain? When my memoir about my life after my brother’s death was published, I was very fortunate that people connected with it.
It’s not easy to feel good fortune from the worst thing that’s ever happened to you. But I suppose I felt pleased when the experience that had once made me so lonely suddenly became a point of connection. I had not always been an open book.
I was 22 when my brother died from a rare bone cancer. The people around me didn’t know what to say about this awful thing, so they pretended it hadn’t happened and I pretended, too. For a few years I was a ghost in my own life.
Nothing felt real. I got very good at imitating normality, imagining I was in a video game called Office. Continue reading...
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