On Writing Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief

On Writing Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief

Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief began the day my fiancé confessed—a line of dental floss dangling from his incisor—that he did not want children. Not with me, or anyone, ever. This was news. After twelve years together, a wedding planned and looming, I had assumed not that we would have kids, but that we would resolve the question of kids together over time and many conversations.

I thought a decision would come to us both, preferably at the same moment, our hands entwined after lovemaking or while considering a stirring vista on some extravagant trip we would or would not take again, depending upon this mutually-agreed-upon revelation. Now, it seemed, the decision had been made for me. I had no say in the matter of my own potential motherhood. I knew, of course, that I could leave this man for the possibility of having a child with someone else.

Except when you are deeply in love with your partner of over a decade, with a wedding dress purchased and steamed, guests RSVP’d chicken or duck, the band booked, the venue secured, the mortgage signed, well, it doesn’t much feel like an option. I had no intentions of leaving my partner. I couldn’t imagine my life without him; we were eighteen—children! —when we met.

Though I did not realize it at the time, my sense of self was entirely dependent upon us as a unit, a team, who together had lived in six states over twelve years, completed college and graduate schools, first jobs hired and abandoned, family losses and complicated friendships, scaled mountains and fished in innumerable bodies of water, swam naked, cried, laughed, dug in trashcans for lost things, built and destroyed dozens of gardens.

We were thirty-two years old, so while there was time enough for us to have a baby, I could not fathom time enough to became a mother in another way. I was sad, angry, and lost. And because writing is how I navigate complicated questions, I started writing.

My first questions: Could I live out my life by channeling my creative energy into art-making alone? Or did this insatiable creative imperative require a body inside my body, a child of my own? Should I leave my fiancé, my long love, for the possibility of another shade of loving? These were emotional questions, yes, but they had legs. They suggested still more questions, critical ones about my experiences with grief and how they might influence my perspective. I had my own reticence about having a child, and while my partner was not going to work through it with me, I still needed space to navigate.

Particularly, I was concerned about motherhood, the political and social institution, that in this country anyway, abuses, exploits, and gaslights women. I worried about the loss of autonomy and time; about the ways my work might suffer. I worried about getting pregnant and then my brother dying. 

Creative nonfiction writing is a puzzle through which to make sense out of the magic and mystery of lived experiences; to take stock of the world around you; to create connections and meaning out of seemingly disparate ideas or events.

The best creative nonfiction is not about the self, but through the self. Personal experiences are the occasion for inquiry, and also provide the emotional stakes. As life evolves, so too does the work. This is the challenge I love best: recapitulating myself to the work as my ideas and experiences shift. My life changed and so did the book. We married, and then two years later, at the husband’s behest, we divorced. I did not have to make that decision after all, although in hindsight, he only accelerated a process already in motion.

Right before the divorce, his father fell from a ladder and died. We bought a house on a hill in rural Vermont and watched the gardens go to seed. My only brother continued to overdose on heroin. I found myself encircled in a community of women who saved my sanity, maybe my life. In a last-ditch effort to save our marriage, I adopted a one-eyed dog. Meanwhile, Trump was elected to the presidency. The world raged and burned. All of this influenced the book. All of it became the site and source of new thoughts; visions; places to locate and plug into awe. 

This is how this book became: in a kind of call-and-response with the world. One cognitive shift prompted another. Digressions grew wings. I reflected back on my father’s death when I was seventeen and felt surely that his wonder and love had escaped his body like a ghost and found its way into my body. I wondered what this meant for me; my future child.

By the time I wrote the last essay in the collection, the pandemic had arrived and my brother had a daughter. Three weeks after her birth, he relapsed. In putting the collection together, I organized these essays thematically as a series of collisions: life and death; love and grief; joy and terror.

Each of them tells its own story and asks its own questions, and together they create a portrait of a life en media res, a place of no answers, but seismic shifts. This book will resonate, I hope, not because it contains universal stories, but because in their specificity the reader will see parts of themselves reflected back, their most curious, capacious, hungry selves, navigating life’s most treacherous boundaries and bountiful plains.

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Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief: A Memoir

Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief is a fresh and ferocious memoir-in-essays that maps the boundaries of love, language, and creative urgency. When Nelson’s father dies from an accident caused by complications from alcoholism, she knows immediately she has inherited his love―that it left his body, traveled through the air, and entered her own. And so, she needs a place to put it. She needs to know what to do with it, how not to waste it, how to make something with it, how to honor it and put language to it. So, she places it with her brother, Eric, whose opioid addiction makes his death feel always imminent. With her partner, Jack, together for fifteen years. With her exhausted, grieving mother, her best friend Jessie, women at the gym she’s never had the courage to speak to, but loves completely. But mostly, she places it with her future child, the one she does not yet have but deeply wants. The child who is both the question of love―and the answer to it.

So, when Jack suddenly confesses that he does not want to have children―not with her, not ever―the someday vessel for her boundless and insatiable love hunger swiftly disappears, taking with it a fundamental promise of her life: motherhood. Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief catalyzes from this place. Fluidly navigating through past, present, and future, Nelson asks: Where does her desire to have a child come from? How does wonder charge and change a life? Are the imperatives to make art and to make a child born from the same searching place? Are they both masked and misguided attempts to thwart death? Nelson investigates the tremulous makings and unmakings of our most intense and fragile bonds―family, friends, lovers―with searing insight, humor, and tenderness.

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Jessica Hendry Nelson is the author of the memoir If Only You People Could Follow Directions (2014), which was selected as a best debut book by the Indies Introduce New Voices program, the Indies Next List by the American Booksellers’ Association, named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Review, received starred reviews in Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly, and reviewed nationally in print and on NPR—including twice in (O) Oprah Magazine. It was also a finalist for the Vermont Book Award. She is also co-author of the textbook and anthology Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2021) along with the writer Sean Prentiss . Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Tin House, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Carolina Quarterly, Columbia Journal, Painted Bride Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, PANK, Drunken Boat and elsewhere. She is Assistant Professor in the MFA program and English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and on faculty in the MFA Program at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.
Official Website: JessicaHNelson.com
Instagram: @jhnelson427
Twitter: @jhnelson427
Facebook: /Jessica.nelson.73700
LinkedIn: /jessicahendrynelson

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Category: On Writing