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Welcome to the 5 Questions Series. Each week, I’ll ask five questions of some of my favorite authors, editors, publishers, and other industry professionals. This week, I’m talking with Anne Pinkerton.

Welcome and thank you for agreeing to talk with me. You write a lot about grief and the loss of your brother. Besides your book, you have written essays on the topic, including an excellent one I just read called, “Shitty Anniversary.” So, I’m excited to talk with you today and loss and creativity.

Thank you! That’s on my blog, TrueScrawl.com, where I publish when inspiration strikes and I want to say something timely. And I’m always struck on the anniversary of David’s death, which is the topic of the post you reference. Everyone I know who has lost someone remembers vividly the day it happened. And, frankly, even if some comforting or happy memories surface, those anniversaries tend to be overarchingly shitty, because the reality of the death insists on being remembered, too. I guess I want to be honest about that.

Read the whole interview.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

When I was 35, my beloved and heroic older brother David died suddenly while hiking in Colorado—he made a misstep and fell 200 feet from the top of a 14,000-foot peak. Added to the predictable shock and heartbreak, I found the experience to be as isolating as any I’ve experienced. I hadn’t realized that society at large doesn’t think losing a sibling, especially as an adult, is a big deal.

Though the people in my life were supportive, everyone’s patience for others’ grief is limited. I figured, surely, there were books—as an avid lifelong reader and writer, that was the obvious place to turn for consolation and company—but there weren’t.

The shelves of my local bookstores were laden with stories about the death of parents, spouses, and children, but there were none about sibling loss. Clerks scratched their heads. I had to search online to find exactly two books that addressed the experience of losing a brother or sister: The Empty Room by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn and Surviving the Death of a Sibling by T. J. Wray. The dearth of material on the subject told me as much about it as what the pages in these two books did, but I was grateful to have found anything.

So, in part, I was compelled to write my book to help fill what I consider a substantial void in the literature of loss. I was also driven by my brother’s life—one that was inspired by adventure and compassion. He was a successful doctor and an accomplished athlete who had traveled the globe to participate in competitions of so many kinds: mountain biking, ultramarathons, cyclocross, adventure racing. He loved to be outdoors in wild places, trekking and orienteering, being with teammates and doing it solo. I wanted to tell the whole world how amazing he was.

Read the whole interview.

What do you hope your readers take away from your work? What are you trying to achieve?
With my book and related essays, I’m very much hoping to shed a light on sibling loss and make others understand this extremely common, but widely overlooked experience. It’s become a bit of a mission. Because there was so little literature about the deaths of brothers and sisters when my brother died, I felt especially compelled to tell my story so that other siblings didn’t feel so alone the way I had.

I tend to lean toward writing about difficult life experiences, especially the ones we don’t talk about, as I’m hoping to find meaning and open up those conversations. A lot of people feel they have to hide in the dark with their challenges, and I sincerely believe that writing and reading about them can provide comfort and make life much lighter. It’s like that James Baldwin quote: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” So, I also write about mental health, illness, divorce, family, and friends, hoping to find that right balance of personal and universal to connect with readers experiencing similar things.

Read the full interview.

Some writing subjects we get to choose. Others choose us, and won’t let us rest until we’ve completed what needed to be on paper. Anne Pinkerton had the latter experience. “I often say that the subject matter chose me, not the other way around, and wouldn’t it be nice to write about fun things? But since my brother died and I started sharing writing around loss and grief, I’ve felt a bit like I have a calling.” 

Read the whole interview

Anne credits Bay Path’s MFA faculty—with kudos to Professors Mel Allen, Leanna James Blackwell, and Kate Whouley—for their mentorship and encouragement to embrace the memoir first as her thesis project and, ultimately, as a book.  

“I am so grateful to Bay Path because it opened doors to a writing community that I am part of even today. The program not only gave me confidence as a writer but also the support to say, ‘I am a writer.’”

The title of Were You Close? came from a question Anne was repeatedly asked. The response can best be summed up by Anne, “The writing process helped me keep my brother alive on the page. In a sense, we did grow closer. And by shaping his story on the page, I gained some control. I can’t change what happened, but I can change how I own it.”

Read the whole piece.

Anne Pinkerton’s Were You Close? explores the complexities of grief after the death of her adult sibling, her older brother, David. This memoir-in-essays brings David into focus as Pinkerton tries to understand their early bonds and their family dynamics. By adopting the initially painful question of her title as her own, she becomes a seeker, attempting to integrate memories of him more fully into her life.

From the outset, Pinkerton’s memoir presses against how we process grief and render it on the page. Our impulses to categorize grief are often impulses to deny it. Is this essay collection a species of cathartic writing or a reclamation of history? Grief remains shattering, shocking, and unbound.

Were You Close? is a painful yet rewarding read, tragic and hopeful. It illustrates how adult-sibling loss has a lasting impact on the way we relate to others. In a poignant acceptance of her new reality, Pinkerton references her title: “I was certain that one day David and I would be not just close—in any and every way it can be described—but very close. I wasn’t entirely wrong. I just didn’t have any idea about how it would happen.”

Grateful to Renée D’Aoust for this thoughtful review!

“It’s always a little risky when you write about your own life, and I naturally tend to be a very open person and writer — perhaps a little too open for some family members — but I am what I am, and challenging personal topics are the ones that draw me in. I don’t know how to write any other way than to listen to what is asking to be written and heed the call.”

Read the entire Q & A

Pinkerton includes a moving chapter of how she and her mother, a year after David’s death, travel to the area of south central Colorado where he died to scatter his ashes, both of them reluctant at first to approach close to the site.

She also does a strong job examining the emotional toll his death took on her, especially in trying to understand the swings she would have between grief and anger when people asked her how she was doing — or if they didn’t ask.

“We, as a culture, are so inept about death and dying, loss and grief,” she writes. “Worrying over how to address a bereaved person can paralyze us with fear, so we avoid it at all costs.”

Big thanks to Steve Pfarrer for this sweet coverage in my local paper.

Thank you, Susan E. Casey for having me on to to discuss #WereYouClose.

Listen in as we talk about:

Losing my brother to a hiking accident in 2008
The lack of sibling grief resources and literature
The heavy grief that came with not knowing how exactly he died
Why I named my book Were You Close?
Handling my brother’s ashes
The Colorado Fourteeners
Understanding my brother’s love of extreme sports
What the writing experience was like as I was trying to honor everyone in my family
How long it took me to write this book

I am ecstatic to have signed a contract with fabulous independent publisher Vine Leaves Press, which will release my first book on April 11, 2023! A memoir about navigating the loss of my beloved older brother, Were You Close? was a semi-finalist for the River Teeth book prize in 2019.

Were You Close? tells the story of a heroic big brother, his little sister, and a perplexing accident that drives her to explore his attraction to risk, their relationship to each other, and how to live in the world and their family without him.

I am so honored to have an essay in this new anthology from The HerStories Project among thirty other midlife women who describe their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. The book is scheduled to publish next month, but you can pre-order now! If you do it before July 15, you also get a ticket to an author reading and an e-book version for absolutely FREE (plus, you will make me look good).

Order the book here.

I’m so thrilled that my memoir manuscript was a semi-finalist for the 2019 River Teeth book prize!

What an honor to be interviewed for this important article in SELF: “What Happens When Your Grief Doesn’t Go Away?” by Patia Braithwaite in August 2019.

I was delighted to be selected as a recipient of a Straw Dog Writers Guild Residency at Patchwork Farm Retreat in January 2019. It’s where I finished the first full draft of my memoir.