Without Her

Michael Colbert interviews Rebecca Spiegel about grief, ceremony, and her debut memoir. Daisy and Walden share good links.

“I felt exposed and relieved, proud and terrified; I held on for dear life to the connection, the attention, the validation, the ability to be honest and to be heard. I resolved to continue to write in my journal, and then, once another month had passed, to share again.”

In her debut memoir, Without Her, out from Milkweed Editions this September, Rebecca Spiegel is teaching in New Orleans when she receives the call that her younger sister Emily has died by suicide. She travels home, where she encounters her family and participates in Jewish ceremonies to commemorate her sister’s life. As she pores over the artifacts of their life together—old photographs and G-chats, Emily’s laptop and her artwork—a story about complicated family dynamics, mental illness, and eating disorders unwinds. Without Her is unflinching and honest, with Rebecca examining everybody’s lives, including her own, in order to understand both her sister better, and how to find a life for herself without Emily.

Spiegel and I met at an MFA program in North Carolina. We spoke over Zoom to discuss religion, grief narratives, and the relationship between writing and the self.

Michael Colbert: Religion plays an important role throughout the book: you detail Jewish ceremonies following Emily's death and reach a complicated reckoning with faith at the book’s end. What did you want to unpack about your faith, or maybe faith more broadly, through the book?

Rebecca Spiegel: I don't think I set out to unpack anything. It surprises me even what a presence it has in the book. Around big life events, religion does have a much clearer role to me. There's a lot of structure that it provides and comfort that it seeks to provide that I think feels sort of infuriating because it's so impersonal, but also part of the point is that this is a universal experience.

No matter how closely one adheres to a formal religious practice or feels spiritual, for me, the experience of processing and moving past the worst of my grief required a sort of faith. I do think there was a natural intertwining of interest in spirituality and Judaism in those first several years when I was just trying to believe that this was going to get easier.

I listen to a lot of On Being with Krista Tippett. It’s based around spirituality, but she interviews scientists, physicists, mathematicians, writers, and anthropologists. I listened to so much of that in grad school and in those years when I was writing the book.

MC: There's this one line about social media: “To see how others were memorializing her on social media inspired both comfort and contempt—I wanted my pain to be shared, but particular to me, unique. I wanted them to remember that I was the one for whom this loss was truly devastating.”

There’s something unifying to ceremony, tradition, and connection and the power that offers, but also there's a loneliness within that. How did you understand that space?

RS: I mean, I think you just described it: [laughs] the comfort and loneliness. I was desperate for and resentful of connection. It was fraught. It’s interesting how hard it is, at least for me, to let go of the idea that my pain is unique. That one epigraph from Sarah Manguso really spoke to me: “I want to know about my particular grief, which is unknowable, just like everyone else’s.”

There is a similar way in which a ceremony that's bringing people together is meant to facilitate connection and provide some sense of comfort. I never experienced the words as comforting—they've always felt sort of trite—but it was physically being present with other people that felt meaningful and kind of lonely at the same time. This is where the writing came in for me. Without sharing anything about what I was experiencing, that sort of togetherness only went so far.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• “bleach” by skaiwater (Spotify)

• Fontaines D.C.’s Romance (Spotify)

• Local man destroys record stylus; makes sick beats (Bandcamp)

• Sam Goldner reviews the insane debut solo single from black midi’s Geordie Greep (Pitchfork)

• The FADER editorial staff—including Dirt contributor Vivian Medithi—ran a 2024 Song of the Summer bracket (The FADER)

• Angie Martoccio interviews Binchtopia host / singer-songwriter / general cool-online-person Eliza McLamb (Rolling Stone)

• 2004 James Spader 😍😍😍 (Hi-Femme)

• Another 2004 hotness icon: Lola from Shark Tale (Them)

• Nicole Kidman on Babygirl: “This is something you do and hide in your home videos.” Sex in the movies is back, baby! (Vanity Fair)

• Chick-fil-A is launching its own streaming service (Deadline)

• P.S. Walden’s gonna be on NPR’s Weekend Edition this Sunday talking about our Worst Songs Ever roundup—tune in! (NPR)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Read Atemporal: Numero Cinco for free online (Atemporal)

• “The field of paleontology is mean. It has always been mean. It is, in the words of Uppsala University professor Per Ahlberg, ‘a honeypot of narcissists.’ It is ‘a snake pit of personality disorders.’” (Intelligencer)

• How to preserve the intangible? Helena Miton on the survival of cultural practices without written records (Aeon)

• A technological crash feels closer, more inevitable, than ever—and Laurie Anderson is still making art about it (The Line of Best Fit)

• Leigh Claire La Berge tells the story of Y2K: the tech crash that never was (n+1)

• Embrace holes: Eileen Myles and Precious Okoyomon in conversation (Interview)

• “The biggest Red Pill is just reality itself”: A survey of Gen Z political memeposters and their hyper-specific, constantly shifting “e-diologies” (Politigram)

• A perfectly twee, then quietly heartbreaking, then life affirming diary of Walt John Pearce’s rosebushes (The Paris Review)

• Contributor corner! Zach Schonfeld reviews Fake Fruit’s Mucho Mistrust for Pitchfork; Drew Millard on the PMC (that’s “Post Malone Countryalbum”); yearning has infiltrated Angelica Frey’s Italian Disco Stories; multiple friends of Dirt in this LARB meta-group chat on group chats

• I get her. (Reductress)

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