by Robin Black
“Has Beth died yet?”
I was nine years old, maybe 100 pages into Little Women, when a friend of my older brother asked me that. I remember still, some 45 years later, the sensation of utter desolation pouring into me. Dual desolation: Beth was to die! And, I know too soon!
Taking them one at a time: Beth was to die! This was a game changer for me, as a reader, eventually as a writer. Maybe also as a child. Little Women was the first book I read in which tragic events played so realistic a role. Tragic, irrevocable events—of just the kind I had seen and been disoriented by in my young life. After my shock passed, as I began to integrate the knowledge of Beth’s demise into my being, I found myself oddly comforted. Here, in this book, I would find the confirmation I had been craving, unknowingly craving, that life could be very hard, that I wasn’t alone in experiencing it that way. Little Women, for all there was a stream of treacle running through it, would not tell me the big lie, the one about everything getting fixed in the end. Here was an echo, rather than a taunt.
Books shifted for me then from being solely entertainment to offering companionship in the endlessly challenging task of moving forward, whatever life brings. Beth’s death haunts my own work now, as I am drawn again, again, to the question of how people reconfigure themselves after being decimated by loss. It is this fact about us all—that, for the most part, we are able to recreate hope and purpose—that most interests me and moves me about humans. Little Women didn’t set that preoccupation into my soul, but it did show me how literature can encompass it.
And as for the spoiler: I know too soon! The lines that can be drawn between events more than 40 years apart are generally shaky, and this is no exception, but my own novel, Life Drawing, begins, in the first sentence, with the disclosure that a central character will die. There was nothing conscious at work, as far as Little Women goes, but the early experience of reading a book knowing what is to come and knowing that it is a death had the inevitable impact of shifting my focus from wondering what would happen to wondering how it would happen and what would result. It is a different kind of reading, reading without that central suspense about event, and it suits me enough that I wanted my own readers to be inside my novel armed with a built-in spoiler, if only to focus their attention more closely on “how?” and on “why?” than on “what?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOWyIqGDZZs
And of course, the two threads are intertwined. We do in fact all know what happens in the end, though usually not how. We live with that reality, and it is in that context that our ability to find value in life, to find joy, to care, to hope, to tend, and to love is most surprising and most beautiful.
“Has Beth died yet?”
Beth is always dying, always going to die, has always died. And this is why I write.
This post is part of our annual Lit Matters series, in which writers and readers express why supporting and elevating literary arts—the mission of Lighthouse Writers Workshop— is important to them. If you agree, consider supporting Lighthouse on Colorado Gives Day. Mark your calendar for December 8 or schedule your gift now. Thank you!
Robin Black is a frequent visitor to Lighthouse and the author of the story collection, If I loved you, I would tell you this, a finalist for the Frank O’Connor Story Prize, and the novel Life Drawing, which was long listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the Folio Prize, and The IMPACT Dublin Literary Award. Her latest book, Crash Course: Essays From Where Writing and Life Collide, will be out in April 2016. She'll be visiting Lighthouse in May for her Denver launch.
