Without Her: A Chronicle of Grief and Love

Spiegel debuts with a staggering account of the aftershocks from her younger sister’s suicide. While teaching in New Orleans in her early 20s, Spiegel received a phone call informing her that her 21-year-old sister, Emily, had been found dead in her car on her Colorado college campus. Spiegel immediately returned home to Philadelphia, where she was thrust into funeral preparations. Shaken, Spiegel rekindled a relationship with an ex-boyfriend; after the pair took a months-long international vacation, she broke up with him and applied to creative writing MFA programs, where she began work on a memoir about Emily’s death. With remarkable force and precision, Spiegel untangles her family’s history with mental illness, eating disorders, and suicidal ideation (“Yesterday I went to the railroad tracks to lie in front of a train but when it came I couldn’t stay there,” wrote one of Spiegel’s aunts, who died by suicide 30 years before Emily, in a diary Spiegel uncovers). Meanwhile, she weaves in haunting dispatches from Emily in the form of Google chats, artwork, and excerpts from her old letters and writings, including a sixth-grade assignment where Emily wishes “good health” to her future self. The results, while not exactly cathartic (“How naive I had been to believe... enough time might mean something different is possible for me,” Spiegel writes), make a major impression. This is stunning. (Sept.)