Q&A With Ayelet Tsabari

In which I talk to the acclaimed Israeli-Canadian author about grief, healing, and whether losing our dads when we were kids made us grow up faster or slower

On the left, Ayelet's new novel, the reason I interviewed her in the first place. On the right, the best cover shot I could muster of her 2019 memoir, which made me want to talk to her all over again. Read 'em both! Read everything you can of hers. (Also her short story collection, The Best Place on Earth.)

When HarperCollins Ltd. published Ayelet Tsabari’s memoir, The Art of Leaving, in 2019, I put it on hold at my local library. I’m a sucker for a memoir by someone like me, whose father died young and whose life has been shaped by an early introduction to grief, by absence instead of presence.

A month ago, I interviewed Ayelet for an upcoming Moment Magazine Q&A about her debut novel, Songs for the Brokenhearted. The novel is a moving and evocative story about a Yemeni Jew whose beloved father dies when she is young, who has a conflicted relationship with her mother, and who spends most of her twenties away from home, living or traveling in America and southeast Asia.

I wondered if the story was autobiographical. When I asked, Ayelet pointed out that she’d written a memoir, and that while some details in Songs for the Brokenhearted were based on fact, it was very much a work of imagination. That’s when I went back to the library and borrowed The Art of Living again. The first time, I hadn’t finished it. This time, I couldn’t put it down.

I was so taken with her story that I was relieved I hadn’t read it before the Songs for the Brokenhearted interview: there were details that resonated so strongly with me that I probably would have spent the whole time asking her about her life instead of about the novel. But I really wanted to talk to her about her grief experience, so I emailed and asked if we could have another conversation. She graciously agreed.

Initially I asked her for basic background information. She told me that she was a month shy of her 10^th birthday when her father died. He was 40. He’d been in and out of the hospital with heart problems for eight months, but his death was still a shock. Her newly widowed mother was overwhelmed with grief and the responsibility of caring for six children who ranged in age from two to 21, including one who was about to become a Bar Mitzvah. Ayelet, the second-youngest, fell between the cracks — or, as she explained to me, “between the chairs,” the Hebrew equivalent of being overlooked.

Ayelet adored her father. In addition to being a lovely man, he understood and appreciated her passion for writing. Before falling ill, he had promised to publish her very first book of poems. She didn’t only lose him and his encouragement, at some level she felt like she lost her mother and siblings as well.

DW: You said that your mom kind of checked out after your Dad died, that she wasn’t really there for you.

AT: I felt abandoned by her in a way—she just retreated into her grief. I understand now, looking back, what she’d been through. I can’t even imagine. Someone once —I don’t remember where I heard it—compared grief to someone going into a room and punching every person. Each one of them feels it on their own—there’s no collectiveness. It felt like that, like we were all on our own with our own grief and our own pain. It didn’t feel like something we experienced together. It was very lonely in that way. In my memories, I feel like I was alone a lot, even though I know there were other people in the house. We all disappeared into our own griefs.

DW: When do you feel like you started to heal?

AT: Probably just when I was in my early 20s.

DW: Okay, I have to say, maybe it was healing, but that part of your life didn’t look very healthy. And that part of the memoir really had an impact on me, especially the period after you got out of the army and went to southeast Asia and took a series of transient, under-the-table jobs to pay for cheap accommodations and the mind-altering substances you ingested pretty much daily. I kept thinking, “Ayelet! These are not good choices!”

AT: It’s a complicated thing. I don’t think I was always happy, but there was some agency, an active search for something else, and in that way I felt there was something positive, just being in the world and not being in my hometown or with my family, just exploring and doing different things. A lot of the times I was miserable. I think I was way happier in my thirties than in my twenties, but in my twenties, I started to have agency.

DW: I think you and I were similarly at sea in our twenties—which I think is common to most people in their twenties, regardless of whether they have one living parent or two. But we were both still very much grieving at that time, and your way of dealing with it was to live close to the edge, while mine was to be a rule-following goody-goody—except for the once or maybe twice a week I’d go out with my friends and get completely wasted on girlie drinks. So basically, I was unafraid of consequences at most twice a week. You never seemed afraid. 

AT: No, I really wasn’t. It is shocking to me now. There was something very freeing about this. That, I think, is when the healing process started, having agency, and crawling out of the depths of it, of that grief, of that sadness.

DW: When I read about your adventures in India, I thought, “what’s she doing?” I was worried about you, and maybe a little irritated, to be honest. Which, admittedly, is weird. I mean, it’s not like you were hurting me. But I thought you might be hurting yourself.

AT: In my mind at the time, it wasn’t self-harm. There’s something about risk-taking or living on the edge that made me feel more alive. If anything, it was that.  And creating different stories about yourself in a sense, so that this is not the only story, the loss of him, which was such a tremendous part of shaping the person that I became. I didn’t want that to be the only story.

DW: And so you went off on this adventure, and you lived and wrote a whole new story.

AT: I was living—I think I say that in [The Art of Leaving] — living wildly, and living loudly, as a way to almost drown out that kind of grief that was just everlasting in me, in my body. So I think that was a part of it. At the time I don’t think I could have named it or understood it completely, but in some primal way I almost thought that by distancing myself [from my family] I am protecting myself—so I don’t get hurt if something happens. It’s like walking away, leaving, so you’re not going to be left. That is a big reason, too, why I acted the way that I did.

DW: Sometimes I feel and think that having lost a parent at such a young age has made me stronger in certain ways. Though sometimes I wonder if that’s a defense mechanism, a way to rationalize this profound and awful loss that nobody under the age of, say, 30, should have to go through. And at the same time, I know that in certain ways, growing up took a lot longer than it would have if my father hadn’t died when I was 13. Did you have that experience?

AT: I think a lot of people think that it made me grow up faster in a sense, but I don’t think that’s true. I was, in many ways, immature for a long time. I feel like growing up took longer, and maybe that had something to do with my mom not having the capacity to put a lot of energy into the acts of raising [me], so in a sense I was left to figure out a lot of things on my own. I remember figuring out basic life skills in my early 20s and I was like, “Wow. I probably should have known how to do that by now.”

DW: Not long before your dad got sick, he told you he’d publish a book of your poetry. At the time, you didn’t know that he, too, was a writer. I found that particularly poignant because it felt to me as if he was giving you his blessing to go forth and do that thing you wanted to do— become a writer. It’s a connection that not a lot of us in the Dead Parents Club get, this idea that we’re fulfilling our parent’s promise in the best way.

AT: For my 50^th birthday, I got a tattoo of his poetry, in his handwriting. It’s actually a line that appears in the memoir, in the essay about him at the end, called Unravel the Tangle: “Join forgotten words into verse. Unravel the tangle.” It was significant to me that it was about writing. It is taken from a poem he wrote about the act of writing, and what writing meant to him. That idea of unraveling the tangle when we write—I just love that. It definitely feels like that was a legacy or an inheritance that he left, and as I say in the book, I reversed the promise that he made to me: he wanted to publish my work, and it was reversed in my head that I will publish, and I will do this, for him. And I think that may be partially why it took so long [for me to write books], because it became such a heavy thing to carry.