ABSTRACT
What can a writer say—write—when his mother dies? Can writing help him come to terms with her excruciating pain? With her final days in an anonymous hospital? Can writing overcome grief? And what about the ethical dilemma of writing about a loved one’s death? Is it “deplorable,” as the narrator of Helping Verbs of the Heart (1985) wonders, when writing “grows out” of another’s death?
