Own Voices -- Death

[ColGray]

Let me preface this by saying this thread may make some folks uncomfortable because I'm going to talk about death and the Own Voices ideology--specifically, around people using emotionally charged deaths to create or amplify emotional stakes.

I've read a number of books* recently that use dead or dying children, and specifically, daughters who died from cancer, as a way to quickly goose the emotional stakes in a story. As a father who buried an a child due to cancer, I find it generally cheap, occasionally well written and nearly always omitted from book covers/blurbs because it's never the book's focus: it is included only to say something about the MC. To be clear, I'm not talking about where the main story is about the dead or dying child (e.g. The Fault in Our Stars), but rather where it's the throw in to makes the reader think, awwww, that's sad.

It comes off like a failed Bechdel Test for Emotions -- the inclusion is about casting the MC in a sympathetic light without engaging with the humanity or impact of the thing casting that light. It's similar to 90's and 2000's books and movies including cooky secondary LGBTQ characters as a comment on what a good/open person the MC was, or including a victim of sexual assault to highlight resilience or the MC's acceptance of them, or being friends with someone from a different country/language group/skin color/socio-economic class shows MC's worldliness and magnanimity, etc.

As far as I can tell, none of them have lost children or even have experience with cancer (though, understandably, people don't always disclose/discuss this, nor should they need to)--and it shows in a way that (I assume) other own voice groups see when their experience is tokenized for emotional currency. Of the recent books, TJ Klune's is the only one that felt honest and grounded because it was centered in grief and the engagement wasn't around how this affected the MC -- and it obliterated me (in a good, cathartic way) because it centered the grief with honesty.

The others just felt false-- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was the worst. The opening 20% of the book occurs in a children's hospital and in a pediatric cancer ward and the closest equivalent i can give it is reading a description of NYC written by someone who has never visited and grew up in rural Idaho.

Bad things happen and stories can and should engage with tough events and emotions. But cheapening real emotions and struggle into, This will cast my MC in such a good light, drives me bonkers. The Own Voices discussions I've heard tend to center around cultural experience, sexuality, gender and race, with occasional discussion of neurodiversity and religion. In talking to a close friend who is a widower (he similarly finds books where the MC just buried his wife but doesn't engage with the emotions of it cheap and pervasive), we realized grief is generally not included in Own Voices discussions. It made me start thinking about other formative experiences that are ignored--yet immediately stand out as false to the knowledgeable group.


*
TJ Klune in, Under the Whispering Door
Gabrielle Zevin in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (non-terminal, but lots of early time in a pediatric cancer hospital)
Kazuo Ishiguro in Klara and the Sun (1 dead daughter + a bonus terminal child!)
Tamsyn Muir in Gideon the Ninth
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

 

[tinkerdan]

I'm not sure Own Voice has anything to do with OP topic and putting it here is like all those posts about politics and religion that we try to avoid.

Death is something we all deal with--every culture:; every race; every religion; every country; every community; worldwide--almost all things have this in common...we come to an end.

Death is all around us and we all at sometime will experience the grief it causes. I certainly don't want to diminish or dismiss anyone's personal grief--but there are many forms of grief that reach beyond death and each person reacts differently to those.

Have I lost a child--no, thank God, not yet; but grandchildren I have and the loss of a nieces child.
I have lost a parent; however on the surface my grief was much different from when my wife lost her father. Her grief was longer and more pronounced outwardly.

I have gone through two divorces the first was very traumatic and seemed much worse than the grief I had for the loss of my father. Yes a divorce can be as grievous as a death.

Loss of a job-a profession--can be grievous. The first time I lost a job it was a job I had worked for maybe three years and then one day the IRS came in and closed it down because the owner was neglecting his taxes. I was a manager and didn't have children; but this job was like a child to me and it was a difficult experience--maybe not the same as the loss of a child, but I'll have to get back with you on that and hopefully I'll die before I have to do that.

The next job I lost I was fired--that had it's own trauma; but maybe not as much as the surprise IRS visit. Still the results was grief.

If the story is going to be about grief and that's what the reader was expecting--they bought it for that reason--then I think that it should be properly represented--however; I'm not sure about judging something that clearly looks different to different people.

And this is where Own Voice might actually come into the whole picture--because often race, religion., and culture have an effect on how people experience and process the grief. However there are elements of grief that show up in death, divorce and other major loss that are very similar.
These could be used to express the grief in those kinds of books.

However;
if the grief is used in a fiction novel it tends to work toward a means of explaining how or why a character relates to the situation around them and how that impacts their agency and I don't think that needs to dwell on the actual grief experience--unless that grief is happening right there in the story and even then going too much into depth and trying to 'make it real' could kill the reading experience. I recently read a novel that was half the grieving experience and half of an interesting story that though the grief had some impact it didn't justify half the novel dwelling in the misery.

My wife's grief for her father was so different from mine for my father--does that mean that one of us misrepresents grief? I don't thinks so. So even as someone who grieves, who are we to judge just what is real about this character's grief or lack there of.

The final question might be--did they use that for sympathy in their story or do you as the reader perceive that, out of disappointment that they didn't grieve the way you did?

 

[sknox]

I see this as part of a larger trope (or trick?) employed by authors to try to gain sympathy for the MC. Rather than Save the Cat, it's more a case of My Cat Died. It's the event early in the story, even in the first chapter, that is traumatic and somehow both explains and justifies character actions for the rest of the story.

I agree it's cheap, or even lazy. My own pet peeve is with The Fifth Season, where the child is killed at the outset (in the second person, no less), but it can be applied to stories that begin with some epic battle, or with the Virtuous Villagers being slaughtered, or with a sexual assault, or <trauma of choice>.

The problem, in story-telling terms, is that it's too soon for me to care.

I need time to meet the characters, to learn their foibles and strengths. Then that epic battle starts to mean something. First let the MC save the cat. Then, later, if you have to kill the cat, the act will have resonance.

The other problem, already identified, is when the act is thrown in but not followed up. It gets used as justification, but it provides little insight into the characters choices and actions. It's less a reason than an excuse. Harry Potter suffered the loss of his parents, but there's much more to his development as a person than the trauma. That loss frames his story, but it doesn't *tell* his story.

All that said, there's an additional layer here, indicated by the OP; namely, it might very well be that <trauma of choice> is a real thing for your reader. If I'm going to choose to place some act of violence or tragedy center stage, I had better put some careful thought and some damn good writing into it. Make the story worthy.

 

[ColGray]

Sorry for the delay in responding -- been caught up in a couple things and haven't had a lot of free time.

@tinkerdan I appreciate the thoughtful response and I want to be super clear that I'm in no way trying to compare and rank relative grief. The only wrong way to grieve is to avoid it. We all do it in our own way, in our time, and for, by and how we relate to the person and the loss. I stopped attending a blended parent/child therapy group where everyone had lost children/siblings because a couple adults focused on having a "grief-off" to rank their grief vs others. Legitimately, some of the worst things I've ever heard someone say with earnest intention. I'm super uninterested in that and find the need to compare to be indicative of deflection and avoid/delaying the grieving process

I think @sknox hit my issue on the head: it's an "elevated" Save the Cat but one that isn't viewed or treated with the same care modern authors exploring traumatic violence, sexual assaults or gender/race/orientation themes. It is often used to explain character flaws or bad behavior -- in the way that a lot of books/movies in the 70-90's would use being a US Vietnam Vet as, shrug, that's why Johnny drinks and fights and kicks puppies. There is no engagement with it; it just is.

My reflection is that the effectiveness of deploying traumatic grief depends on the difference between pity and empathy. Traumatic grief is often used to illicit pity (poor 'ol Johnny and his drinkin' and puppy kickin'). Pity is the passive observer looking down upon the sufferer from a distance. Empathy is the compassionate companion walking alongside, feeling the weight of the suffering as if it were their own. One involves a sense of detachment and perhaps superiority; the other dissolves the divide between self and other, fostering connection and deeper understanding. It's the difference between Scrooge (at the beginning of a Christmas Carol looking down on the poor but, shrug, oh well) and Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird) and telling Scout to crawl inside another's skin. Empathy requires immersive engagement, where the observer not only recognizes the suffering of another but feels it alongside them.

Which is the strength of an Own Voices centered story. People stopped using <trauma of choice> as a short-hand for pity when people with direct experience blew them away with the empathy of actual engagement. It just hasn't happened with traumatic grief and/or child loss.

 

[HareBrain]

My reflection is that the effectiveness of deploying traumatic grief depends on the difference between pity and empathy. Traumatic grief is often used to illicit pity (poor 'ol Johnny and his drinkin' and puppy kickin'). Pity is the passive observer looking down upon the sufferer from a distance. Empathy is the compassionate companion walking alongside, feeling the weight of the suffering as if it were their own. One involves a sense of detachment and perhaps superiority; the other dissolves the divide between self and other, fostering connection and deeper understanding.

This might be a bit OT, but I'd add sympathy as a third approach. I think this sometimes gets lumped in with empathy, but I see it as an act of imagination (rather than true empathy, which is instinctive and uncontrollable): putting yourself in the other person's shoes rather than suddenly finding yourself wearing them too. It allows the degree of dissolution of the divide to be controlled to some extent, which can be helpful. I also think we can't feel true empathy for our own invented characters because we're aware they don't exist, so imaginative sympathy is what we need to make them credible if we're not writing purely from our own experience.

 

[Swank]

Unless you're writing a book about children that get cancer, I really don't understand the compulsion to illustrate character through some tragedy unrelated to the story. It simply isn't necessary to explain away every nuance of character as the product of events. I don't think people are products of events, solely. Happy people make their peace with their tragedies, sad people ratify their beliefs with theirs. Real people are more than events - and characters should surprise the reader with choices that aren't the inevitable outcome of just experience.

Or maybe I'm missing the point?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

*
TJ Klune in, Under the Whispering Door
Gabrielle Zevin in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (non-terminal, but lots of early time in a pediatric cancer hospital)
Kazuo Ishiguro in Klara and the Sun (1 dead daughter + a bonus terminal child!)
Tamsyn Muir in Gideon the Ninth
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

I’m so sorry for your loss, there are no words.

I’ve read a few of these and have a reasonable knowledge of others - Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, for instance is derived from the Dickens source material.

In some I think the lost-child was used to good effect - in Klara and the Sun it was used to highlight how a life can’t be replaced.

Others I think do it less well - Tomorrow x 3 has it as a plot device with little need for it in the story (whereas the disability storyline is consistent and well done, I thought)

I also think - if we have something that resonates strongly with us, do we have extra (and correct) expectations of it and find it hard when that doesn’t happen?

 

[ColGray]

I also think - if we have something that resonates strongly with us, do we have extra (and correct) expectations of it and find it hard when that doesn’t happen?

I think that's exactly correct--and brings me back to the Own Voices centering. If the author's goal is verisimilitude, then the benchmark to achieve that should be those who live it, not the minimum expectations of the tourist / ignorant. It's aiming for honesty, versus pointing at checklist characteristics in a zoo of tropes: "Oh, look honey: a <trauma of choice> / <BIPOC> story!"

Ex: Tomorrow x3, I DNF'ed maybe 33% of the way through after the laughable rendition of a pediatric cancer ward and the conversation that takes place in the Harvard MBTA station (also laughably portrayed relative to the real location). But would someone who identifies with the physical disability --and not pediatric cancer--have bounced off the story bc that, too, was portrayed in a cursory, uninformed way? Everything character nuance felt skin deep.

OTOH, Egger's A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS blew me away (for many reasons) but mainly because nothing was skin deep. If something was introduced -- background, characteristic, flaw, desire, etc. -- it went to the marrow. Nothing was cursory.

It's a fine line between inclusion and tokenization/reductive trope-ification and becoming aware of the need/difference is, I think, dependent on gaining perspective & empathy for a tokenized experience, often by being tokenized. You can see the door and understand it's a thing, but you haven't seen the vistas and cliffs until you walk through the door. Or maybe that's just me.

 

[ColGray]

Unless you're writing a book about children that get cancer, I really don't understand the compulsion to illustrate character through some tragedy unrelated to the story. It simply isn't necessary to explain away every nuance of character as the product of events. I don't think people are products of events, solely. Happy people make their peace with their tragedies, sad people ratify their beliefs with theirs. Real people are more than events - and characters should surprise the reader with choices that aren't the inevitable outcome of just experience.

Or maybe I'm missing the point?

I thought I could reduce people to a checklist of their external attributes but now you're saying I have to think about their insides, too?! What's next, treating people like they're more than the sum of their parts/events??

/s

 

[Swank]

I thought I could reduce people to a checklist of their external attributes but now you're saying I have to think about their insides, too?! What's next, treating people like they're more than the sum of their parts/events??

/s

Not people - characters. And you can present those characters without puzzle piece backgrounds. Instead, they can do stuff in the present and become people-like that way.

 

[ColGray]

Not people - characters. And you can present those characters without puzzle piece backgrounds. Instead, they can do stuff in the present and become people-like that way.

I'm being silly, but it's an excellent point.

In, THE SPEAR CUTS THROUGH WATER, I adored that the author built up why a character was missing an arm and how everyone treats him as a man of ill-fortune -- and then had the character explain how he lost the arm off screen. Just an exceptional execution of, the present is what's important.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I actually really enjoyed Tomorrow x 3, in part because of the characterisation where there were so many flaws. i don't think it was supposed to feel like an unflawed book and what you mention didn't detract for me, partially because I was reading it on that basis.

But I also saw it as a take on the gaming world, where everything is surface-heavy because it's a visual medium. That the whole thing felt a bit like a game (we turn the corner, and there the other player is...) I forgave what I might not have in other books

I felt that, in many parts, it didn't get going, but there were others were the depth was excellent (for different reasons - in the spoiler)

Spoiler: plot points for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

In the chapter where Marx dies, I thought it was terrifically well done, with a real inward sense of our own mortality, especially as a relatively young adult, with potential ahead. It turns out he was the beating heart of the book, and we were too busy looking at Sam and Sadie, who had many of the flaws you have already picked up on
The subsequent chapter, the RPG one, I also loved (I'm in the minority on this one, I know) because it played with the sense of secondary worlds being where our healing can lie, that what we can't face in this, we can in another. It also played with the creator as the manipulator.

 

[Phyrebrat]

Just fyi if like me you’ve never heard of the Own Voices thing;
I snaked this from the net:

Reading an Own Voices book means being confident that the worlds created or described in a book are represented as authentically as possible

More later when I’ve had chance to read the thread properly

 

[Montero]

@Phyrebrat - thank you for that, I was wondering.

Someone in the thread commented that the child was killed off before you'd even got to know them.
One of my pet peeves of mostly 90s fantasy was that you'd get a good set up of the life of a happy farming village and all the little ups and downs in the first bit of the book, length varied, and then along came the invading army or plague and wiped almost all of them out. Just as you were starting to care about them. Time and again. Sheesh. Flick the pages and skip to the bit where the heroic person or group goes for the revenge/quest/cure and don't put yourself through learning about a village that will never live again.

In terms of Own Voices - I have many times complained about the lack of understanding of the scientific mindset, the experimental, enquiring mindset in fiction and how frequently it is done as an attribute thrown at a character which features in the first three chapters and is then lost from sight forever more. Many writers do not understand the inner world, and pervasiveness of a person with a talent/passion. As a scientist, and a person who notices things, I find that so frustrating and indeed dull. I was expecting an engaging story that included someone's passion and it just fizzled.
Honorable exceptions are
Julie Czerneda's Species Imperative series - the scientists are fantastic in that, and scientific investigation is core to the story
T Kingfisher Saint of Steel series which absolutely understands being an expert, being perfectionist and how your expertise informs the way you see every day life - the perfumier is always alert to smells and scents wherever she is, the paladin is always conscious of threats and a little bit of his head is tracking how to deal.
Tracy Whitwell (I think) Accidental Medium series. The main character is an actress, so is the author, and a lot of the details of north London arty life and the acting world are really interesting.

On grief, Katharine Addison does it very, very well in Witness for the Dead. It turns out that the main character does have a grief in his past, but you are not smacked around the face with it in the opening, it emerges very slowly, trickled into the story and you can see how he is living under the weight of it and how it dulls him.

 

[sknox]

I wonder as a reader how I am to discern between the trope that is handled cynically and the trope that is merely badly written.

I tell myself--I do not always succeed in this--that I ought not judge the author too harshly. I might read it has someone merely using a tragedy (or any other trope) as a cheap play for sympathy and reader engagement, yet the author themselves might have been entirely in earnest and been nothing worse than incompetent. Even if the rest of the work is well-written, the worst I can assume is that the author thought they had chosen well whereas I saw it as cheap or bungled. Or just plain bizarre.

But I try not to accuse the author of motives I can't possibly know.

Again: I do not always succeed in this. But I do try to use conversations like this one as a reminder. I'm sure that someone out there has read something of mine and dismissed as insensitive cultural appropriation, or of some other au courant offense. To repeat a wit from my youth: I am innocent of every crime I've ever committed. <grin>

 

[ColGray]

@Jo Zebedee

That's interesting and (experientially) know how healing gaming and gaming worlds can be. I think i would have enjoyed and/or found that resonant-- i just couldn't get past the first 75-100 pages.

I remember reading a cool study a while ago about a teacher (i think? maybe a therapist?) who works with kids who've lost a parent by building shared worlds in Minecraft. Having a shared space, with minimal eye contact, and the ability to engage with grief while doing something else (so the engagement is one of X things they're doing, not the only thing) has proven to be highly effective.

 

[ColGray]

In terms of Own Voices - I have many times complained about the lack of understanding of the scientific mindset, the experimental, enquiring mindset in fiction and how frequently it is done as an attribute thrown at a character which features in the first three chapters and is then lost from sight forever more. Many writers do not understand the inner world, and pervasiveness of a person with a talent/passion. As a scientist, and a person who notices things, I find that so frustrating and indeed dull. I was expecting an engaging story that included someone's passion and it just fizzled.

Yes, exactly. Own Voices is foundationally authentic and in reaction to the tokenization of a mindset, culture, experience or event to "deepen" a character--but the tokenization is jarring for informed readers and breaks immersion. Authentic execution adds depth and dimension to the character. Tokenization is painting a character outline with surface stereotypes. Anyone with direct knowledge sees it and thinks, Well that's bs.

On grief, Katharine Addison does it very, very well in Witness for the Dead. It turns out that the main character does have a grief in his past, but you are not smacked around the face with it in the opening, it emerges very slowly, trickled into the story and you can see how he is living under the weight of it and how it dulls him.

I adored the portrayal of grief in Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking. They're wildly different (relationships, ages, MC's, experience, expression, etc.) but amazing works.

 

[sknox]

> represented as authentically as possible
Well, there lies the rub, doesn't it? One person will read something--it could be nearly anything, really--and it reads as authentic. Another reads the same and is offended, or dismisses it as drivel.

SF writers (and readers) encounter this all the time. One person reads a passage as solid science while another finds fault, and still a third doesn't notice much one way or the other.

I encounter this with not just historical fantasy, but any fantasy that even uses history as framework. The more I read as a historian, the more fault I find. I try to let it go, try not to be overly critical, but sometimes I just want to engage in a healthy round of book tossing. Which is hard on my e-reader, I can tell you.

I'm sure the same happens with sexual stereotypes, racial biases, cultural tropes of all sorts. "As authentically as possible" can only apply to the author, and maybe to editor or beta reader. I can cast my net widely, but the wider the net the greater will be the range of reactions. One set of words can't possibly accommodate all.

I don't know how to resolve this, except from one small angle. As a reader, I can apply this much judgment: if the author *claims* something, they must deliver. If they *claim* to be historically accurate, or have accurate physics, or have accurately portrayed the magic system they've put forward, I can judge that. Beyond that rather narrow scope, things get awfully muddy. I try to apply the same principle to myself as an author. I try to be aware of what I'm claiming, either explicitly or implicitly, and try hard to deliver on my promises. If the result rings false to someone else, all I can say is I did my best.

 

[ColGray]

> represented as authentically as possible
Well, there lies the rub, doesn't it? One person will read something--it could be nearly anything, really--and it reads as authentic. Another reads the same and is offended, or dismisses it as drivel.

Can I poke on this? I'm not sure I agree.

Own Voices (as a movement) demarcates between, The people being represented, and, Everyone Else.

If i write a character that represents and relies upon being identified as part of a defined demographic group (age, geography, orientation, etc.), the people invited to judge how authentically i presented that demographic are the people of that demographic. It's like in stand up comedy and someone punching down--hey, look at that person and their <weird/off-putting/different> <physical attribute>.

Example: In the movie, Breakfast at Tiffany's, was Mickey Rooney in yellowface an authentic representation, as judged by the people who was (supposedly) representing? Audiences might have cheered or cringed or whatever--but the question of authenticity lies solely with the represented demographic.

With that said, I'm struggling to think of a book that I read, or that I know of, where a character was portrayed authentically and where the character offended the people represented by the character. Inauthentic characters can offend their represented demographic because they're inauthentic. An authentic character can offend others by authentically voicing an offensive viewpoint--Huck Finn was an honest portrayal of 19th century of a rural boy in the American south and he was casually, suuuuuper racist.

tldr: it seems like authenticity is a solid defense against unintentional offense while inauthenticity creates the conditions to offend

 

[Swank]

Example: In the movie, Breakfast at Tiffany's, was Mickey Rooney in yellowface an authentic representation, as judged by the people who was (supposedly) representing? Audiences might have cheered or cringed or whatever--but the question of authenticity lies solely with the represented demographic.

The problem is a character like Charlie Chan. At the height of his popularity, some were critical of his slightly stereotypical behavior, while many Chinese Americans were proud to have a mainstream Chinese detective character that was revered for his intelligence and effectiveness.

Who's right? And who is or isn't a good judge of representation among the demographic?



The joy of SFF is that you never need to represent anyone.

The problem with representing groups of people is the tendency to fetishize them. Why does a character importantly need to be Tibetan, have ADHD, survived cancer? How much does being Indian mean that the reader is supposed to assume a bunch of stuff that the writer is too lazy to establish in prose?