Let me start by saying I judged this book before reading it. I picked it because I thought it would be fluffy. This book reached into my heart and squeezed it hard; probing me for grief I had forgotten about. It made me laugh and remember amazing things about my own family at a specific time in my life. It left me so very very satisfied and yet grief stricken while giggling sometimes. This book is anything but fluff, but it’s also not a deep meditation in sadness. It delicately balances so many things.
The book starts simply enough. We meet Florence Day, a ghost writer for a famous romance novelist who has a bit of a problem–after a rough year in the romance department (understatement of the year), she no longer believes in love. This translates to her trying fruitlessly to come up with a way for her protagonists to “kiss and make up” or to profess their undying love to one another…the actual results and rewrites are kind of hilarious. Because of her struggles she goes to her new, and extremely handsome new editor with a cactus in hand begging for an extension, only to be turned down. Perceived failure shrouds our heroine–her love life ended in betrayal, her own novel never made it past the first printing, her ghost writing job feels like abject failure, life in the big city isn’t quite as fun and glamorous as she had dreamed, and then none of that mattered because of one phone call…
…telling her that she needed to come home because her father had died.
And this is where the book took a different direction than I had expected because I thought we were going to have a light romance where Florence (who can see and talk to ghosts), falls in love with a ghost and hijinks would ensue. I did indeed get that! The relationship between Ben and Florence is one that grows out of admiration and helping each other forgive themselves for things that were out of their control. It’s well written and feels healthy without being corny. It’s what I would want for anyone reading this review…it’s what we all deserve.
BUT…this book is also about grief. This is about that phone call. This is about the time I got that very same phone call. This is about how to navigate the world with a giant gaping hole in your heart when all you want to do is scream, cry, curl into a ball and hit something all at once. Things are even more complicated (if you have never experienced it) by the fact that grief can make you want to be selfish so that it’s personal, because that might be the last bit of them you have left…the pain of them being gone. Some people lean on their people when grieving, some people try to do everything for everyone else so maybe they don’t have to have the overwhelming waves of grief and pain. Florence throws herself into the task of fulfilling her dad’s funeral wishes (wildly fun and lavish wishes). When I was in her shoes, I decided it would be a good time to pick up a TV that my dad had gotten repaired. When the repairman told me he couldn’t carry the giant heavy tv because of insurance purposes it felt GOOD to drop it on the floor and let it smash everywhere…”Oops! I guess it was too heavy for me to carry“. Each fragment of glass on the floor housed my pain, my anger, and my exhaustion of having to feel so much–but it was also mine, I didn’t have to share it with anyone. Florence gets to this point too–she has a wonderful family (just like me), but even wonderful people have history and they have to navigate their pain together and forgive each other for past events and perceived insults and they have to share the weight of the grief. Luckily, Florence has Ben to also help her navigate as an outsider looking in.
Ashley Poston took the concept of “love is dead” and applied it to everything. It was beautiful; it reminded me how much I’ve healed, and how much I’ll always have moments where I’m stunned by grief so many years later. I’ll leave you with this quote because it’s not just about romantic love, it’s about all things that end and it’s about accepting your membership into the “Dead Dads Club” despite never wanting to join:
“I began to realize that love wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t forever, either. It was something in between, a moment in time where two people existed at the exact same moment in the exact same place in the universe.”
PS. If the term Dead Dads Club icks you out, sorry about that, it’s just my dark humor.