New York Times bestselling author! Clare Mackintosh, I PROMISE IT WON'T ALWAYS HURT LIKE THIS: 18 Assurances on Grief
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens, and I am the host of this podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:08]I am also a newly minted USA Today best-selling author of the novel, Blake.
[0:14]I've created a whole community of book lovers around this podcast, a publishing company,
[0:19]reading retreats, a bookstore, and more. Learn more at ZippyMedia.com or follow me on social
[0:25]at Zippy Owens or join the community at Zippy Readers.
[0:31]Claire McIntosh is the author of, I promise it won't always hurt like this,
[0:35]18 Assurances on Grief. Claire is the multi-award winning author of four Sunday Times best-selling novels,
[0:42]translated into 40 languages. Her books have sold more than 2 million copies worldwide,
[0:46]have been New York Times international best-sellers, and have spent a combined total of 50 weeks
[0:51]on the Sunday Times bestseller chart. Her most recent novel is hostage. Claire lives in north
[0:56]Wales with her husband and their three children. Welcome, Claire. Thank you so much for coming
[1:02]on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss. I promise it won't always hurt like this,
[1:06]18 Assurances on Grief. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's really nice to see Claire.
[1:11]I know I sort of accosted you in the halls of the LA Times best of all to tell you how much I loved
[1:17]this book, but oh my gosh, you're so amazing. I'm so sorry for your loss, and I know I'm not supposed
[1:24]to say. I don't know. There are all these things I'm supposed to say in that day. For the book,
[1:27]but I'm sorry, and the book is heartfelt and beautiful and amazing, and it's going to help
[1:33]countless people. So thank you. Thank you. And please don't worry about what to say. I don't
[1:40]ever want, I don't want this book to come across like a list of things we shouldn't say, because
[1:46]actually what you've just said, I'm sorry, is exactly what we should say to people who have lost
[1:52]people they love. Thank you. I want to just read a passage. Is that okay? Can we start off with
[1:57]that? Are you okay? Yeah. Okay. There's so many places that I dogeared because they're so
[2:02]great and useful and helpful, but mostly it's your own experience, which I want you to give
[2:08]context for. But let me just read this page if that's okay. Okay. So you've gone to bed. You say,
[2:13]when I wake, I know instinctively that it isn't morning, there's a thickness about the dark,
[2:17]a chill in the air. There's something else too. A sound from one of the children's rooms
[2:21]on the top floor. Quietly I slip out of bed and climb the winding staircase to find a sliver
[2:26]of light beneath one of the doors. I push it open. Can't sleep. Tears stained cheeks shine in the
[2:32]half light. Want to talk? A shake of the head. It's just the sentence disappears. I sit on the bed
[2:37]and offer a shoulder and we sit in gentle silence. I think of how dark those nights were after Alex
[2:42]died, how long it was before I could switch off the light. I think of how sobs turned me inside out
[2:47]and how I thought they would never cease. It's just, it's just everything, isn't it? When it's dark,
[2:52]it's the silence in the room pressing against the noise in our heads. It's the what ifs and the what
[2:57]now that if only is and the wise worries that seem reasonable, even laughable on daylight swell
[3:03]in the dead of night when the house is quiet and there is no one around to divide them into more
[3:07]achievable steps to make plans and offer comforting hugs. Sleep becomes impossible. Sometimes
[3:13]there is no solution. We can't change decisions made years ago or take a different path.
[3:18]We can't bring back the people we loved. We have to let our hearts cry and accept that it hurts.
[3:23]We have to believe that it really is darkest before the dawn and that soon the skies will
[3:27]be streaked with reds and golds and the ache in our chest will subside. Oh, Claire.
[3:35]It's hard to read without crying. It's beautiful. It was hard to write without crying.
[3:40]But, you know, books should make us feel, shouldn't they? Whether we're writing them or reading them,
[3:45]they should make us feel something and that is as true for fiction as it is for nonfiction.
[3:51]So that passage, that passage is talking about one of my my living children, obviously,
[3:56]and I suppose what one of the many, many gifts that my son's death gave to me was an enhanced
[4:06]compassion and empathy for people struggling with things, whether that is the, you know,
[4:13]the huge monumental problem, or actually a very small problem that just feels enormous because
[4:19]it's the middle of the night. And so I'm very grateful to my son because the five weeks that he
[4:26]lived has taught me a great deal. Can you tell listeners what happened and more about who Alex
[4:33]was and your experience? Yeah, Alex was one of twins. So I had, I gave birth to twin boys in 2006,
[4:43]Josh and Alex, and when they were five weeks old, Alex died from manageitis, he suffered a
[4:50]severe brain hemorrhage and we had to make a decision. And the decision we made was to remove him
[4:56]from intensive care and to allow him to die. 15 months later, I had a surprise second set of twins,
[5:04]Evie and George, and so my life sort of went from mother of two to mother of one to mother of three
[5:12]or four, depending on which day it was and how I felt about it. So it was a very, very, very
[5:18]difficult time and continued to be a difficult time for many years. And in the book, you,
[5:24]you take us, you've structured it as a helpful guide, right? 18 things, you know, every chapter
[5:30]more useful than the next. Like I promise you won't always fear the worst. And I promise you
[5:35]won't always feel so guilty. And I promise you won't always be winded by someone else's happiness.
[5:41]Every chapter has one of these things, these reassurances. Well, assurance is that's why you put it
[5:46]in the subtitle. Yes, but it's really your own story that is most helpful because you are guiding
[5:51]the way by saying like, this was the worst thing that could ever happen. It happened. And somehow
[5:56]I got through it in that I continued to live, but the way in which you did so felt like
[6:03]the darkest of times, humanly possible. But yet, here you are. And you can write about it.
[6:08]And anyway, the way that you melded your own story was so compelling. And I don't know, it's hard
[6:15]to read the book and not just want to give you like the biggest hug. And also to say thank you
[6:20]on behalf of everybody else, you know, for whom it will help. In the book, you talked about how
[6:26]writing it required you to sort of disconnect. And that some days you were just a mess. And
[6:31]can you talk about that and even how you found the inner strength, calling whatever to keep going
[6:40]when it was so difficult? I think the most powerful thing about memoir specifically, not
[6:46]autobiography, not self-help books, but memoir is this lived experience. And this
[6:53]experience is related by someone who is just like you, just an ordinary person who has been
[6:58]through a terrible thing or a profound experience and has learned something from it. And in order
[7:04]for that memoir to be powerful, to be helpful, to resonate, it has to be completely honest and
[7:12]authentic. And in order to be honest and authentic, it can often be quite painful. And so writing
[7:18]it, although ironically, I started writing the book because I felt I had reached a point in my grief
[7:24]that I could talk about it. And I could be helpful in my accounts of it. Actually, as I started
[7:31]writing the book, I realized I still had some processing to do, some grieving to do. And so it
[7:37]unlocked quite a lot that I think I hadn't dealt with. It forced me to take every emotion out
[7:45]and looked at it and try and articulate what it was about it that had changed over the last
[7:52]18 years. And it was hard. And there were chapters in that book or sections of that book that I
[7:59]where I cried a lot, sections that I couldn't write in my house because we live in a different
[8:05]house now. We live in a different time now. You know, you have sort of phases, don't you, in your
[8:11]in your life. And this phase of my life is a really happy one. And I didn't want to pull all that
[8:19]early grief up into this life now, into this house that's full of finding sports kits and
[8:27]you know, family dinners and all the sort of happy things. And so I wrote those bits when I was
[8:32]away with work, when I was staying in hotels, traveling around the world. And I could cry and
[8:39]have a glass of wine or a cup of tea and no one would knock on the door and no one would ask why my
[8:44]eyes were red. And I just sort of left little pockets of my grief in hotel rooms around the world.
[8:51]But it was very, it was cathartic, you know, people talk a lot about writing being therapy and
[8:57]this book certainly was. That would be a neat idea actually to have like a grief room in a hotel
[9:04]and you would just go and anyone grieving could come and just leave their grief there. And you would
[9:09]it would be like, you know, some sort of cleansing right to know that everyone who's come before you
[9:14]also was letting go of their grief there. It would be amazing. I feel like it would need some very
[9:19]strong, great filter to sort of suck it all out. So it just wasn't pouring more grief into you.
[9:24]Yeah, that's true. Well, maybe it would have to be a really happy color or something, you know,
[9:28]it would have to have great music or I don't know something that you wouldn't normally associate
[9:33]with it. But Claire, so this is not, so you are, you have a major career as a best-selling, amazing
[9:40]author cranking out books. You're amazing. And yet you decided to take on this project in the
[9:46]interstitial periods. So why and talk about your other work as well?
[9:52]So yes, my official career title is indeed an amazing author of amazing best-selling books.
[9:58]That is how I'm described.
[10:00]Yes, you can use that. You can use that. Put it on your website and take it.
[10:03]So what happened was this, there's a backstory to this book and the backstory is that
[10:10]in the weeks after Alex died, a woman that I'd never met before came to my door with a bunch
[10:16]of daffodils and she had lost a child many years previously. She'd been sent to meet me by a
[10:24]mutual acquaintance who thought that it would be helpful for me to talk to her and she had come
[10:29]to promise me that it wouldn't always hurt the way it was hurting men. That I would be able
[10:35]to smile again, to laugh again, to do all these things. And I didn't believe her. It didn't seem
[10:41]possible because I felt as though I'd been thrown from the top of a skyscraper and should buy
[10:48]all definitions be dead. But somehow I was just about alive. But it just felt like my organs
[10:57]shutting down. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't walk. My hair was falling out. It was horrific.
[11:02]And so I looked at this woman who was not just surviving but thriving and I thought you're lying.
[11:09]It can't. That can't be true. And then what the way grief has felt to me is like a long
[11:18]train journey where you're engrossed in a book or you're talking to someone and you don't notice
[11:24]the miles pass and then you look up. And the landscape through the window is totally different.
[11:30]It's no longer city, high rises and houses. It's open fields and trees and you don't know what
[11:36]point it changed. You just know that it's completely different to the way it was when you started your
[11:41]journey. And for me, that point of recognition was four years ago. So it was the 14th anniversary
[11:50]of Alex's death and I forgot the date. And when I realized what day it was,
[11:56]after I'd got over my guilt because obviously a mum's first instinct about anything is to feel guilty.
[12:02]So after I'd stopped being guilty about forgetting, I realized that I had taken this long journey.
[12:10]And so what I wanted to do, I was thinking about the promise that the Daffodil woman had given me
[12:16]and how I hadn't believed it and how she had just had an audience of one. She'd just come
[12:21]to my door and I was in a very privileged position where I had a platform where I could talk
[12:27]to many tens of thousands. However, many people might want to listen. And so I posted my thoughts
[12:36]on grief on what was then Twitter and is now X. And those tweets went viral, 18 million people
[12:44]saw them and I was suddenly inundated with people, with messages from people who wanted to talk
[12:50]about grief. And it became very clear to me that this is a conversation that we need to have,
[12:57]that it's not enough just to say time will heal, that actually it's really important to look at
[13:04]exactly how grief manifests. Because grief for me is like a chronic illness and anyone who
[13:10]is listening, who suffers from a chronic condition, a hidden disability,
[13:15]something that you live with forever will understand this, that you can't be cured of it,
[13:20]you're not going to get better from it, but you do learn over time to manage it. And you'll have
[13:25]symptoms that ebb and flow and flare ups that are triggered by certain things and your chronic
[13:31]grief will be different from someone else's, but it's this collection of symptoms. And so I wanted
[13:38]to write, I promise to look more deeply into each of those symptoms and to pay it forward,
[13:45]I suppose, after that woman's visit to me all those years ago. Oh my gosh, that's amazing.
[13:52]And by the way, Twitter should use that clip of you saying Twitter that is now called X.
[13:59]That was the most beautiful way to ever reference that. I was thinking I need to use that
[14:05]of course, that's not what I think about. I'm thinking about the beauty of the words that you
[14:08]were saying as well. And that's amazing that you've tapped into something which is so clear.
[14:12]And that is why there's this whole field of grief experts and grief books and yet it's not
[14:19]working quite right. You know, like it still can't fix the pain. Like people's pain seems to be
[14:25]it is too big, right? You can't a book when you're not ready for it. I mean, it took you a very
[14:30]long time, right? Alex would be much older now. It's not like you did this the next year, right?
[14:35]He would be absolutely so Alex. Well, so Alex's twin is now 17. He'll be 18 in November this year.
[14:43]He is driving his, you know, choosing college places. He is almost an adult and that shadow next to
[14:51]him is always, it's always going to be hard for me to think about and see. But this book,
[14:58]the writing of it, the conversations it's led to. And that's been the most amazing thing has
[15:03]been going on tour and meeting people who have lost people and bringing their names into the room
[15:11]and talking about them, laughing about them and crying together and having those,
[15:15]you know, even those conversations that you just, you just said we're talking, we're laughing
[15:19]about Twitter and ex and then you said, obviously that's not what I'm thinking about. But that
[15:24]juxtaposition that that sort of meshing of laughing, but then also talking about something quite
[15:30]poignant. That's real life. That's what we need to get better at. We don't need to reserve
[15:38]quiet sort of reverential spaces for grief. What we need to do is bring grief into our
[15:46]everyday, messy, chaotic, funny, sad lives and just normalize it because this is an experience
[15:53]and an emotion that we are all going to have to deal with. You're absolutely right. Yes,
[15:59]Claire, talk about your becoming a writer and the regular work you do and how, because in this book,
[16:09]the gift of your writing is abundantly clear as well. Like you as the craft of it, the way you
[16:17]talk about small details, right? Everyone listening to this can now picture a woman sitting
[16:22]at your table with the daffodils and you amass. I mean, that's a gift, right? To be able to put
[16:27]somewhere, someone with all of those details and facts so that it's in my head now, right? It's
[16:33]in anyone's head and you use this for thrillers for everything. Talk about that and how you
[16:38]know, I do. I mean, I think I've always been a writer. I think most writers have always been
[16:42]writers and certainly I was a voracious reader as a child and I knew for a long time the power
[16:50]of words on me as a reader, but it was quite a while before I connected them to the fact that I
[16:57]could write and realize that I could create a scene that would have resonance in a reader's mind.
[17:03]I was a police officer for many years. I was a public order commander. I was a detective, lots of
[17:10]other things and although it seems like a very different career, there's a lot of storytelling
[17:16]in being a police officer. You're finding true stories, but you're nevertheless telling stories,
[17:23]you're listening to the accounts from victims and witnesses and suspects and you're picking through
[17:29]to see who's the reliable narrator, who's the unreliable narrator. You're finding the story that
[17:36]the forensics have to tell that the cameras have to tell and you're piecing all of that together
[17:42]and writing a compelling narrative for an audience for a judge and jury because that written
[17:49]evidence is hugely important. It's going to explain to a court room not just what's happened,
[17:55]but what impact has it had on everyone? So when I left the police and I left because I was in a
[18:02]mess and my priorities were very skewed. I was desperately grieving. I was really struggling to
[18:09]bond with my second set of twins. There was a lot going on and I needed to step away from work,
[18:16]but I also needed to earn money and the only thing I knew how to do was write. So I wrote for magazines
[18:23]and newspapers. I wrote for businesses. I wrote website copy anything that I could be paid to write.
[18:29]I wrote and in the evenings when the kids were asleep, I wrote a debut novel called,
[18:35]I Let You Go. And that debut hit The New York Times by Cela List. It sold a million copies
[18:41]in 40 languages. I never went back to the police and I've been in a full-time author since 2015.
[18:48]Unbelievable. That's amazing. It's just amazing. It's such a story.
[18:54]But do you know what? I wouldn't be an author if my son hadn't died, not because I was writing
[19:01]about him, but because he was the trigger for me reassessing my priorities, he was the trigger
[19:09]for the outpouring of emotion that suddenly had nowhere to go except into a novel. He's been the
[19:15]reason, but I've had this huge life shift and I'm now doing this incredible job.
[19:22]Well, it's unbrand for this book for you to find the good, great for you to turn something
[19:30]tragic and be hopeful about something in life as a result because that's part of
[19:36]some of these inspiring words that you share. And by the way, the police stuff in the book was
[19:41]also fascinating. I mean, totally fascinating. If I could just read one line towards the end
[19:48]about grief, so this is another piece of grief that people don't talk about. And I think that's part
[19:54]of what the book does as well is, unearthing all of these truths, right? Then making them okay
[19:59]to set.
[20:00]and think and feel and all that.
[20:02]And you say, looking back,
[20:04]I can see I was almost territorial about bereavement.
[20:08]There was no room for anyone else's loss.
[20:11]So talk about that because that's a really interesting concept.
[20:15]Yeah.
[20:16]We didn't talk very much about the ugly side of grief.
[20:19]And it was this side that I wasn't prepared for.
[20:22]I was prepared for sorrow, for sadness,
[20:25]for sobbing gently into a starch-changatchief.
[20:28]I wasn't prepared for turning into such a horrible person,
[20:32]which I did for a really long time.
[20:35]And yes, I felt territorial.
[20:36]I felt I was the one grieving.
[20:40]No one else could grieve for my son.
[20:42]Nobody, you know, grandparents, friends, godparents,
[20:45]all the people around the medical professionals, everyone
[20:49]who his tiny life had touched is allowed to grieve.
[20:53]I mean, how we're allowed to grieve for people we never met.
[20:56]It's the concept of someone's loss that we can grieve for.
[21:00]But I wouldn't allow that.
[21:02]I had no time, no space for anyone else's grief for someone.
[21:07]They'd lost it.
[21:08]I just was, it's selfish.
[21:10]It's a very allowable form of selfishness,
[21:15]but it is nevertheless selfishness.
[21:17]And for quite a long time, I was consumed
[21:20]with this very, very selfish feeling
[21:24]that my experience was like nothing anyone else had ever
[21:28]been through and deserved sort of,
[21:32]I suppose, all the attention.
[21:34]Not in a kind of, I'm sent a stage,
[21:37]come and shower me with, with, you know, attention.
[21:41]But just there was no room in my life
[21:43]to think about anything or anyone else.
[21:46]And I was very relieved when that passed,
[21:48]because I knew it was an unpleasant characteristic
[21:52]that I'd suddenly acquired.
[21:54]But it took a long time before I felt like I was me again.
[21:59]I mean, in a way, that's who is the me, right?
[22:03]It's a different me.
[22:05]The old, I feel like, without, with any big life-shifting loss.
[22:09]Like, the old you has gone, right?
[22:11]And then there is someone new who takes their place,
[22:13]but it doesn't make you not a good person, right?
[22:16]It just itself preservation, really.
[22:18]It's just how to get through.
[22:20]Yeah, yeah, it is, absolutely.
[22:22]But I remember thinking at the time,
[22:24]I remember feeling very alone.
[22:26]Yeah.
[22:27]And I think if, if this book does one thing,
[22:30]I hope it will just help people realize
[22:34]that they're not the only people feeling the way they do.
[22:38]Well, it's absolutely beautiful.
[22:40]How are you managing promoting this book?
[22:42]And then whatever you have coming next
[22:45]and writing whatever you have coming next.
[22:46]And like, what does that look like timing wise
[22:49]on, you know, these, the lines of a timeline
[22:51]and all of that, how are you doing all this?
[22:53]And what is coming next for you and all of that?
[22:56]It's, yeah, it's been an interesting year, actually.
[22:58]I've got a new thriller out of a mystery
[23:02]called the Game of Lies.
[23:03]And so I've done some events in the thriller and mystery space
[23:07]and some events in the grief and memoir space.
[23:10]And there is a very different kind of energy to them.
[23:14]You know, I sort of turn up at my crime events,
[23:17]very sort of, you know, almost jazz hands
[23:20]and let's have a really fun night talking about
[23:22]fictional murder and mayhem.
[23:24]And then I turn up to the memoir events
[23:27]just in a slightly more, I suppose, thoughtful
[23:30]and open environments.
[23:32]But then a lot of my readers crossover between the two
[23:35]and we end up talking about both books.
[23:37]So I've always been very open.
[23:40]I, you know, much like you, I think it's really important
[23:43]to talk about how we feel to, you know,
[23:46]be honest and authentic and show our real selves.
[23:48]And so I've always talked about grief.
[23:51]I've often written about grief, you know,
[23:53]albeit through the filter of a fictional character.
[23:56]So for me, it doesn't feel like two different jobs
[24:00]or two different projects.
[24:02]They're just different parts of my world.
[24:05]And I think that for most of my readers,
[24:07]that's how it feels as well.
[24:09]Have your three living children read the book?
[24:13]One of them has, yeah, I didn't.
[24:16]I didn't suggest that they shared
[24:18]and asked them to, but my books are, you know,
[24:20]they're in the house.
[24:21]And I saw one of them, one of a copy of one of my books
[24:25]in, if I promise, in one of my kids' rooms.
[24:29]And I said, oh, you're reading, I promise.
[24:31]Are you okay?
[24:32]Is there anything you want to talk about?
[24:33]And he said, yeah, do you know,
[24:35]I just never realized how strong you were,
[24:38]which was very lovely.
[24:40]And made me cry.
[24:41]I am all so amazing.
[24:44]Oh my gosh.
[24:45]Well, you are a gift.
[24:48]It is a gift to be able to share like this.
[24:50]It is a gift to be able to get through all of that,
[24:53]to parent through all of that.
[24:55]I mean, parenting twins, if you're not grieving
[24:59]is really hard, I say from experience.
[25:02]And, you know, to put, you know, to be compromised
[25:07]in such a huge way.
[25:08]Oh my gosh.
[25:09]Anyway, your son is right
[25:11]and you are incredibly strong.
[25:13]And so, so helpful.
[25:15]I can just feel the many people
[25:18]who are benefiting from this.
[25:20]It's just a gift.
[25:22]So thank you.
[25:24]Thank you for doing it.
[25:24]Thank you for delving back in.
[25:26]Thank you.
[25:27]It's so lovely to talk to your grad set.
[25:29]It's really lovely to talk to you about it.
[25:31]And I'm really grateful to you for amplifying,
[25:34]for spreading the word.
[25:35]And hopefully, this book will reach the people
[25:37]who need to read it.
[25:39]I was thinking this morning as we were getting on here.
[25:41]I was like, I wonder if Claire is even in the mood
[25:42]to talk about this today?
[25:43]Like, what is she's having?
[25:44]It's like super upbeat, awesome day.
[25:46]And now we're talking about this part of her life,
[25:48]which is so hard.
[25:50]Like, what if she doesn't feel like it?
[25:52]You know what I mean?
[25:53]Like, what if that's like not the vibe?
[25:56]I am, nowadays, I think I'm very at ease with the fact
[26:00]that grief is a thread that runs through my veins.
[26:04]It's just a part of me.
[26:06]And, you know, it's not something I need to dig out,
[26:10]particularly, it's just that.
[26:12]And I talk about it.
[26:13]And sometimes I cry a bit, but that's okay, too.
[26:16]Yeah, that's okay, too.
[26:17]Well, again, I wish I could give you a big hug
[26:20]after this conversation.
[26:22]But thank you.
[26:23]Thanks for coming on.
[26:24]Thanks.
[26:25]Okay. Thanks, Tiffany.
[26:25]Speak soon.
[26:26]Okay. Bye.
[26:28]Bye.
[26:28]Bye.
[26:30]Thanks for listening to Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[26:33]If you love it, please leave a review.
[26:35]And follow us on social at the city Owens and at the city readers.