What Writing about My Scientist Father’s Death Taught Me about Faith

I wrote my novel, The Saddest Girl on the Beach, in the aftermath of my dad’s death. In the book, much like in my life, the protagonist’s journey is one of finding her way back to herself, of figuring out who she is, in a world without her dad. Along my journey of writing and revising, I found myself learning surprising lessons about both science and spirituality, discovering that the two were tied together in ways I hadn’t imagined.

One of my most unexpected emotional wallops during grieving (that I passed along to my narrator) was the dividing line between science and faith. My dad had studied geology and was an educator; while we went to church during my childhood, my dad’s scientific leanings centered most of our dinner conversations around atoms, decibels, the Big Bang, and the Latin names for the bones of the body, which I learned when I was three years old. (My metatarsals are caught, I once yelled when my toes got stuck in the hamper door.) When my dad died, it was difficult for me to reconcile spirituality as source of comfort with the scientific realities of death.

As I wrote and revised, though, synchronicity and the spiritual feeling of something more found me, an opening into a world of connection to a larger universe that I’d left behind while grieving. The more I dug into science to anchor the book, the more I felt a sense of connection, comfort, and a reignition of my own faith. 

For example, a friend loaned me a copy of How to Read a North Carolina Beach, a researched book about the ecology of the Carolina coastline, and I found that the scientific passages sang with poetry. It seemed uncanny that, after researching and writing about the Outer Banks for years, I wouldn’t have already read this book. The book falling into my hands at exactly the right moment awakened my inclination to look to synchronicity and larger forces at play. Instead of dismissing the timing of the book as coincidence, I opened it, as corny as it sounds, as a gift from the universe; the resulting dive into coastal science became a key factor in The Saddest Girl on the Beach.

Science then compelled my narrator to find an unexpected connection to the bigger universe through the geology of the coast. She ruminates on the carbonate fractions in the sand, the parts of sand that comes from things that once lived. I thought of this concept because my dad constantly taught my brother and I facts about the earth. Having my character discover a sense of continuity to other living things was a surprisingly faith-filled act for me as a writer. Through writing, I found that scientific facts held the key to a renewed sense of spirituality for me, rather than feeling like a barrier to comfort.

Whether it was turning the fractals of a rainbow or the geology of erosion into metaphor for my novel, I continually found myself spiritually connected to my own sense of personal faith, which I imagine as feeling part of a larger whole. Locking into something bigger than myself brought a sense of connection through the science my dad was passionate about, not despite or in opposition to it, a sense of faith inside my dad’s science. 

Interestingly, most of the scientific influence on the novel happened during revision, nearly fifteen years after I first drafted the story. The emotional impact of revising a book dealing with grief while still experiencing my own grief was too difficult to tackle immediately. I had to give the project years of time before I could approach it more scientifically, to analyze plot points and objectively look at the areas that needed a rewrite. 

I needed that time between writing and revising for my brain to make connections. I needed that time for the association between faith and science to manifest itself as I wrote the revisions. So maybe the biggest lesson I learned during this process of writing through my dad’s science was to have faith in myself and my writing process, however long it may take. 

Because, in a way I can’t rationally explain, I feel like my faith has changed. I don’t feel alone anymore. I feel strengthened and connected through the writing and rewriting and revising of this book that grapples with the realities of love and loss in a complicated, scientific universe.

My narrator is puzzling and searching as she tries to find her way through deep grief in a world seemingly divided, seemingly at odds with itself. But what I found writing her through this dichotomy was that science and faith are more intertwined that I ever could have imagined.    

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Heather Frese is the author of the novel The Baddest Girl on the Planet, winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize. The book was longlisted for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and was named one of the Women’s National Book Association’s Great Group Reads. She attended Ohio University for her M.A. followed by an M.F.A. in fiction from West Virginia University. Her latest novel The Saddest Girl on the Beach is out now. Connect with Heather at HeatherFrese.com.

THE SADDEST GIRL ON THE BEACH

Grieving after her father’s death, a young woman seeks solace in an Outer Banks beach town of North Carolina where her best friend’s family runs a small inn.

The family welcomes Charlotte with chowder dinners and a cozy room, but her friend Evie has a looming life change of her own, and soon Charlotte seeks other attractions to navigate her grief. Will she, like in some television movie, find her way back through a romance, or are there larger forces at play on Hatteras Island? Heather Frese, winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize and author of The Baddest Girl on the Planet, sets Charlotte on a beautifully rendered course through human frailty, unrelenting science, and the awesome forces of the Carolina coast.

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Category: On Writing