How Hating My First Job Led to My Latest Book

Sara Bennett Wealer

How Hating My First Job Led to My Latest Book

My new young adult novel, GRAVE THINGS LIKE LOVE, takes place in a funeral home. Elaine, the main character, has grown up there, living on the top floors with her family, who run the business below. It’s a unique setting, and one I probably wouldn’t have thought of if I hadn’t hated my very first job. 

I graduated college with a journalism degree and went straight to a small newspaper covering the suburbs outside Pittsburgh, PA. I yearned to write features, but they made me the transportation reporter, which meant I got to write about road construction and gas prices, while listening to the police scanner, covering fires and festivals on weekends. 

Ugh. No. 

I maintained my mental health by looking for subjects I could turn into the kind of long-form color pieces that truly fit my interests. One day I ended up at a funeral for a prominent member of one of the communities on my beat. I’ll never forget the big, yellow Victorian house on the corner in this small-ish town. It was a family-owned funeral home, and I knew it would make a great feature story. 

The owners of the home were kind enough to let me spend several hours with them, soaking in the atmosphere, talking about the business, getting a glimpse of their life. The entire time, I wondered what it would be like to be a teenager growing up in that setting. 

That was more than 20 years ago, and while the name of the funeral home and the family that ran it have faded from my memory, the visual of that big yellow Victorian house has not. Setting a book in a place like that has always been my plan. In fact, the first line knocked around in my head for years before I actually sat down to write it: “There’s a dead body in my house, and before the day is out there will be at least two more.” 

Crafting GRAVE THINGS LIKE LOVE allowed me to draw on all the things that had fascinated me about that small town funeral home so many years ago. I was also fortunate to have a friend from my kids’ school who also grew up in the funeral business. She lived across the street from her family’s funeral home, not above it, but she could still confirm and help add detail to my story. Special thanks to her for reading an early draft.  

And then, for nitty gritty information about the funeral business, including how bodies are prepared for viewing and burial, I was fortunate that YouTube has some awesome videos of morticians answering viewers’ burning questions. Nearly every one of them has a great sense of humor, too. As Elaine’s funeral director father says in GRAVE THINGS LIKE LOVE, “It’s joy in the face of sorrow—the juxtaposition of the Universe.” 

As a young woman starting a career in a field I wasn’t sure I loved, finding that funeral home so many years ago gave me the spark of an idea that would sustain me through an evolution away from newspapers to marketing and writing novels. It’s proof that even experiences we dislike can lead to new ventures we love, and I hope it inspires other young people who, like Elaine, are searching for their place in the world. 

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Sara Bennett Wealer grew up in Manhattan, Kansas (the “Little Apple”), where she sang in all the choirs and wrote for the high school newspaper. She majored in voice performance at the University of Kansas before transferring to journalism school and becoming a reporter covering everything from house fires to Hollywood premieres. She now works in marketing and lives in Cincinnati with her husband, two daughters, and a growing menagerie of pets. When she’s not writing, you can find her at the ballet, or obsessively watching ballet on YouTube and Instagram.

Sarabennettwealer.com
@sbennettwealer

GRAVE THINGS LIKE LOVE

A contemporary YA romance with a paranormal twist: what happens when in between trying to decide which boy is the right boy, a girl finds out the funeral home her family owns might be haunted?

Elaine’s home is a bit . . . different. It’s a funeral home that has been in her family since the 1800s—and it’s why everyone calls her Funeral Girl. And even though she’s lived there her whole life, there are still secrets to be found.

When Xander, a cute new boy with a penchant for ghost hunting, arrives in town, Elaine feels an instant spark. His daring and spontaneous ways help her go from Funeral Girl to Fun Girl. Then there’s Miles, Elaine’s oldest friend, who she’s starting to see in a completely new light.

After Xander convinces her to stage a seance one night, Elaine discovers that her home might be haunted by a kindred spirit—the daughter of the funeral home’s original owner. But who wants to be haunted by the dead when there are boys to spend time with? After all, you only live once. . . .

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing