Grief and Hamburgers:
Stuart Ross in conversation with Heather Birrell
Hi Stuart!
I started reading The Book of Grief and Hamburgers on the way home on the subway from Avondale Alternative, where I work as a high school teacher. You had just done a workshop there and as I read, I was thinking of the way one of my students, Domina, described your work as “a life raft with a clown on it.”
I was also thinking of Mike from Mike’s Burgers. A couple of weeks after my dad died twenty-four years ago, the guy who ran the burger joint across the street from the union hall where he worked called our house looking for him. Mike from Mike’s Burgers was so jolly and casual—sort of half laughing at the fact that he was cold-calling a customer—and I had to tell him that my dad was dead.
My sister and mum and I became a bit obsessed with Mike from Mike’s Burgers, I guess because he got to believe in the “there”-ness of my dad for a wee bit longer than we did.
I love how your book wrestles with the devastating not-there-ness of people. It’s different from absence somehow, isn’t it? I mean absent is when you don’t show up at school or when you misplace your glasses because your mind has momentarily gone missing. Losing someone to death is so fucking irreversible. It’s awful.
I really appreciate how the book is both about that awfulness and also about the impossibility of properly articulating and/or vanquishing the awfulness. That’s the life-raft side of it for me; that I can feel your struggle and share in your sorrow. It is a sad solidarity, but a solidarity nonetheless.
Can you talk about why or how you decided this struggle should be a book?
(Don’t worry, I want to talk about the clown too!)
—HB
Hey, Heather!
Thanks for this thoughtful kickoff to our conversation.
Your story of the guy from Mike’s Burgers reminds me of something that happened a few decades ago. I had an acquaintance named Mike; he was a kid when I met him while I was selling my books on the streets of downtown Toronto in the 1980s. We hung out a few times, and then some years passed. I think maybe I received a letter from him—this was in the era of letters—and never got around to responding. Finally, I decided I would phone him up and say hi, because he was a guy I liked very much. A man answered the phone. “Hi, is Mike there?” I asked. “Who is this?” said the man in a kind of accusatory tone. It really struck me, like I’d transgressed. “It’s Mike’s friend Stuart Ross,” I said. “Well, Stuart, this is Mike’s father,” said this man (he is a prominent Canadian historian). “Mike died yesterday.” I have never forgotten the pain in his voice, and how I felt I had exacerbated the unfathomable pain he must have been feeling at losing his own son, a boy in his twenties.
I’ll get to your question, but I also wanted to say something about “absence.” For me, absence and not-thereness exist simultaneously, because I irrationally keep hoping/thinking/pleading that I will see my mother again, or my dad. They’ve been gone for decades. Or that I will get another hours-long conversation with my precious friend Michael Dennis, the Ottawa poet who died on the last day of 2020. I mean, I know it’ll never happen, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking that I can think it into existence. Even while I know I can’t. The permanency of deadness inspires such absurd thinking.
I started writing The Book of Grief and Hamburgers because in fall 2020 I was grappling for a way to cope with the imminent death of Michael, who had pancreatic liver cancer, but also the sudden death of my brother Barry the previous June. I wrote almost every day, desperately. I know that I came up with the title before I wrote the first sentence, but I don’t think I knew for sure that I was writing something that would actually be published. I didn’t stop to think about that. I was determined to finish it before Michael died, because I didn’t want to talk about him in the past tense. I met the deadline. Pun intended.
As I wrote, I sent batches of my pages to another dear friend of mine, and of Michael’s, the great Norwegian prose poet Dag T. Straumsvåg. He was very encouraging: he said those pages were some of the best he had ever read about grief and that they were helping him. He told me it had to be a book. Michael knew I was writing it. In fact, I typeset a dedication page—For Michael Dennis: “We are the lucky men.” Which was something he said to me not long before he died—and I showed it to him. So I guess I did know by then this would be a book that others would read. That dedication became In Memory of Michael Dennis. I wish it could have been otherwise.
Hi Stuart!
It feels like springtime today, really and truly. I hope you are feeling some of the warmth.
I am so sorry for the losses you have endured—of both dear friends and family.
I’m interested in how writing about your grief became a kind of coping mechanism, and also a way to reach out to others, to process a pileup of terrible losses.
It seems to me that the book is also a rebuttal to the persistent messaging that bombards us regarding “getting over” our grief, or adhering to a prescribed set of steps or stages to transcend our suffering … as if the aftermath of great loss is not, in turn, amorphous, cyclical, heart-rending, and strange.
Your book called to mind a couple of brilliant essays I read recently on the subject of suffering and how we perceive it.
The first, “Suffering Like Mel Gibson,” by Zadie Smith, offers this:
They both [privilege and suffering] manifest
as bubbles, containing a person and
distorting their vision. But it is possible to
penetrate the bubble of privilege and even
pop it—whereas the suffering bubble is
impermeable. Language, logic, argument,
rationale and relative perspective itself are no
match for it. Suffering applies itself directly
to its subject and will not be shamed out of
itself or eradicated by righteous argument,
no matter how objectively correct that argument
may be.
Listen to Intimations—Six Essays by Zadie Smith (Audiobook Excerpt) here.
Read “Intimations by Zadie Smith review – a wonderful essayist on the lockdown” here.
And from the second essay, “It’s a Myth That Suffering Makes You Stronger,” by Lidia Yuknavitch, this:
So let me tell you a different suffering story
that cannot be corralled by a culture that asks
you to process your suffering in ways that
make you a good citizen in an ever-churning
economy of productive people.
Read “It’s a myth that suffering makes you stronger” by Lidia Yuknavitch here.
Okay, so the suffering-state is in some way impermeable, and we exist within a capitalist system that wants to commodify and compartmentalize even our deepest, most individual sorrows—how to proceed?
As writers and artists, it seems the best we can do is try to articulate that suffering and make an offering of it. And your book is such an offering, Stuart!
(Ha! Betcha didn’t know you had written an anti-capitalist screed! Please buy Stuart’s book so he gets some moolah and can keep writing!)
All my connection-making and carrying on makes your book seem far heavier and more didactic than it actually is, both in style and content, when in fact there is a real humility inherent in its structure.
I’ve put artist/illustrator Maira Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty in the mail for you because there is something in how the narrator of that book presents as this oddball flaneuse making her way through memories and people she loves and people she has never met (strangers on the street, artists and writers far away or long dead)—all while observing and commenting with an unabashed tenderness—that reminds me of how the Stuart-narrator of Grief and Hamburgers navigates the world.
Find The Principles of Uncertainty page on the author’s website here.
Grief and Hamburgers also feels like it shares some DNA with the short story “Mother” by Grace Paley, which uses a dreamlike recursive structure to explore the narrator’s longing for her dead mother.… It’s such a powerful story; it hews so closely to emotional experience.
Read “Mother” by Grace Paley here.
The beautiful cover of the book too—it has this magical, provisional, chaotic quality.
Check out the book cover of Grief and Hamburgers here.
Can you talk about which writers or works helped you to find or develop a structure for the book? You mention the influence of Amy Fusselman in the Acknowledgements, and Clint Burnham, in his back cover praise of the book, calls the book a “poem-essay.” Thoughts on genre or the role of white space or how to build a container for things that are uncontainable? … (Also, it occurs to me that your book is the antithesis of the dreaded “hamburger essay,” a stepping stone form used to teach argument in schools!)
Heather,
It’s a rainy day in Montreal, where I am cat-sitting, as I belatedly respond to this. It’s odd: I was writing about my grief, but at the same time trying to explore exactly what grieving is. Because that is elusive to me. Is it just whatever one is feeling after a loss? Then is it a different thing for every person? I wasn’t writing as a way to reach out to others: I was writing strictly as a strategy to deal with the overwhelming emotions that were bursting out of me, as a way to cope with—especially—the impending loss of my friend Michael. At some point in the process, I realized that this could be a book. My editing was very minimal: mostly limited to one day about a week after I’d finished my first draft. I wanted to keep it raw and not polish the chaos I was feeling as I wrote, and that, one year into 2021, I was still feeling. It surprises me that the book has been so well received, and that some people have actually said the book has helped them. I didn’t imagine that might happen.
Your excerpts from Smith and Yuknavitch are powerful; the latter especially resonates with me. I believe suffering erodes us at the same time it makes us face our deepest fears. We may rebuild afterward; we may not. People with a prognosis that offers little hope all respond in different ways. I can’t say that Michael’s suffering made him stronger. He was always an extremely strong man, and perhaps that made his fate all the more galling for him. During his last months he showed strength, just as he always had, even as his physical strength was ebbing.
I’m glad you read my book as an “articulation of suffering.” It wasn’t meant as a self-help book, and I don’t really come to any conclusions. I am just documenting what I am feeling. People can do with it what they want. The first publisher I sent it to liked it, but wanted there to be some kind of resolution at the end, wanted me to have learned something that I could share with my readers. The next publisher thought it was perfect as it was: it fulfilled its function even as it left everything unresolved. I’m not the person to come up with lessons to help the grieving. I can only empathize and rattle on about my own experience.
That piece by Grace Paley is astonishing. Thank you for introducing me to it. In a couple hundred words she accomplished more than I did in my 30,000 or so words. But she offers no insights into hamburgers, so people still need to buy my book even if they’ve read Paley’s “Mother.”
I think one of the most brilliant pieces of writing on suffering and loss is the nine-page story “The Shawl,” by Cynthia Ozick. Had I thought of it while I was writing The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, I likely would have quoted from it. Had I not been in a hurry to finish my book before Michael died, it would probably have been several hundred pages long, as I fed more and more into it. But it’s the book I want it to be.
As to influences, it was entirely the possibilities that Amy Fusselman’s first three books opened up for me. I have been reading and rereading her books for years. I didn’t know how to channel what I was experiencing in the second half of 2020, and I happened to pick up one of her books again, and there was the answer. I owe her so much. This kind of hybrid essay/memoir/prose poem approach she takes. It saved me, in a sense.
The white space was important. When I got the first typeset pages back from my publisher, ECW Press, they had transformed my paragraphs into regular paragraphs, with no line spaces between them, and with paragraph indents. I wanted those spaces; I wanted my text to be kind of floating around on the page, just as my brain was floating, and my ideas were floating, and things were not ordered in my thinking. Their typesetter obliged when I requested the book appear just as my manuscript had.
And thank you for the Maira Kalman book. It is beautiful and I will return to it often, I know.
Hi Stuart!
This will be short(er)—I’m at home with COVID. My kids and partner are sick too. And it’s not the mythical mild version I keep hearing about! We are miserable, but leaning on each other and the glorious—and myriad!—streaming services I keep almost-cancelling …
Anyway, being in this homebound, diminished state with my people (and dog) reminds me how losing family (especially if they are good family, whether blood-family or poet-family) can feel like losing layers of protection against the world.
It is a whole new form of vulnerability.
That vulnerability is very present in your book. There is a really honest, in-the-moment rawness to the writing, and the form gives it a frank, improvisational feeling; it’s so compelling and moving.
I am looking back over all the pages I have dog-eared, and all the passages I have marked, and not remembering exactly why I did so (COVID brain fog, or just regular old brain fog) … I think I was struck by the many rhetorical questions, and all the thoughts that begin with “maybe” or “instead” … all the threads you follow then drop, all the allusions and snippets of poems and wisdom …
I really like this line you wrote in your last response: “I believe suffering erodes us at the same time as it makes us face our deepest fears.”
Reading the Ozick story, “The Shawl,” that you recommended, made me think of the larger legacy of suffering inherent in being Jewish. The story is so devastating. She is incredible. (Her book The End of the Novel of Love was really huge for me.)
You have joked before about being mistaken for a Scottish poet (for our readers, Ross is an Anglicized version of Razovsky, and you have written using the Razovsky persona in the past).
Can you talk about the role your family and your Jewishness have played in your writing? (That is such a ham-fisted—hamburger-fisted?—interview question, sorry.)
Heather,
Really sorry to hear that COVID has hit your household. I really hope it’s behind you soon and there aren’t lingering effects. I don’t know how I’ve managed to avoid it, though being in Tinytown here might be a big factor.
I like that you’re okay with all the threads I dropped in my book. I didn’t do this consciously. It was just that I wrote the book each day without thinking much about what had come before and what might come after. So I hope the book reflects the way people live and think. In this fractured, continually distracted way. You mentioned “improvisational”—makes sense that it feels that way, because that is exactly what it was. Much, or most, of my writing is like that. I rarely plan anything out. I just see where things lead, or just take leaps.
I think you confused Cynthia Ozick and Vivian Gornick, though both have an “ick”! Some years ago I read a book by Gornick about writing, but now I’m going to read The End of the Novel of Love. Thanks!
Although The Book of Grief and Hamburgers talks about Jewish stuff here and there, I didn’t think of it as a quintessentially Jewish book before. Even though the book is a deep-dive into my sad-sackiness, I didn’t make the connection between my experience and this idea of Jewish suffering. I lived my first half century in Toronto, and grew up in a then-Jewish suburban neighbourhood, Bathurst Manor. I am not religious, but I am Jew-through-and-through. Which is part of what makes it a challenge to live here in Cobourg, where the shelvers in the local supermarkets look puzzled when you ask around Passover if they have matzoh.
My now-retired shrink told me a few years back that I’m suffering from displacement trauma—I think that’s what he called it. I do feel like an alien here in this town, and I feel very far away from my roots, and my parents’ graves, and Bathurst and Lawrence, and synagogues. Of course, in my home I feel at home, because I’m with Laurie there. But when I step out the door, I’m a stranger in a strange land. Except when I walk down to the lake and peer across at Rochester, and also feel that this is the same lake that washes up against Toronto.
I suspect, now that I think of it, that my wounds of loss are exacerbated by the loss of Jewish culture comfort as well. In fact, Jewish stuff has gotten into my writing more than ever since I landed in Cobourg. I had always thought it was because I’m aging, but perhaps it’s just as much to do with the fact that my Jewish universe is further away from me every day. I moved here around the time that my novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew came out, and that was followed by the tiny novel Pockets and the poetry collection A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent, both of which explore, to some extent, my identity struggles with my religion.
My immediate family is all gone. They took so much of the Jewishness of my life with them, and now I’m a tartan yarmulke being carried aloft by the breeze. I don’t know where I’ll land.
Hi Stuart,
I totally mixed up my -icks! How mortifying. My first impulse when I read your correction was: “We must redact that! I look like an idiot!” but then I thought about how your book is compelling exactly because it allows for missteps, incomplete thoughts, tangential connections and suggestions …
Anyway, I would like to attribute my mistake to COVID brain, but I suspect it may also have something to do with that other thought scrambler and word thief, perimenopause. And I thought also of a book my kids loved when they were little called Beautiful Oops! In the book—which is a kind of tactile board book—mistakes like torn or bent paper, ink spills, etc., become opportunities to imagine all sorts of wild or oblique (or silly!) images and possibilities. Here’s a video of some kids reading the book aloud.
Come to think of it, the Poetry Boot Camps you run have served as a kind of Beautiful Oops! for me as a writer. You have an awesome way of affirming the loose, loopy links our brains make in your classes.
Can you talk about the role playfulness, joy, and humour—whether of the gallows, slapstick, or absurd variety—have played in your process? (For this book or others …)
How do the clowns make their way onto the life rafts? And are they wearing tartan yarmulkes?
Heather,
I want to get those Beautiful Oops! kids to do a video of them reading The Book of Grief and Hamburgers! Beautiful Oops! looks like a lovely book. If I had kids, I’d force them to read it and enjoy it. Brian Eno was the artist who first made me understand the artistic value of mistakes, back when I was a teenager. I think it was in an interview about the making of his magnificent album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).
I really believe in honouring what you call those “loopy links” that our brains make. It’s one of the main underpinnings of my writing, though I’d never thought of it as “loopy links.” I like the multiple meanings of “loopy,” all of which fit. The Book of Grief and Hamburgers leapt from one loopy link to the next. I just followed along to see what would pop up next. In my brain or gut.
Playfulness, joy, and humour, and the role thereof in my process. There was little of any of that, at least consciously, in the writing of The Book of Grief and Hamburgers.
Joy is something I rarely find in the writing process, which I do not much enjoy. I always need to force myself. My usual rationale is: you better write because what use are you if you don’t? Being a funnel of guilt, as my therapist once called me, is handy when it comes to being productive.
Playfulness is something I experience. I think of it more as “trying out crazy things” or “trying to get away with stuff.” There’s a certain satisfaction in doing something nuts in my writing and then seeing that it—or believing that it—works. Experimenting, to me, is play.
As for humour, this has always been a point of contention for me. When I put out my first full-length poetry book, back in the 1990s—I don’t remember the exact phrase—but my editor said he wanted to show people that I was a great poetry humorist. But I don’t consider myself a humorist, in my prose or in my poetry. I think there’s some funny stuff in there, and some elements of absurdism for sure, but I don’t sit down and say, “This’ll be funny.” I just go where my writing leads me, so that often you will find a laugh and a weep within lines of each other. Actually, I don’t know what you’ll find because sometimes people laugh at readings when I read something I think is kinda poignant. Not sure if it’s a defence mechanism, a response when someone doesn’t quite know how to react, or just a difference in emotional opinion. The reverse happens, too, but not as frequently.
It may be that surrealism comes naturally to me, but many people find surrealism funny, simply because it’s weird.
Re tartan yarmulkes: is my humour “Jewish”? I don’t know. It’s possible I come from a tradition of Jewish writers who laugh existentially at tragedy as a survival strategy. But I don’t often consciously try to make people laugh. I do try to make myself laugh, though. By daring myself to write something pretty stupid. Like spelling Alice Munro with an “e” on the end of her last name. God, I’m hilarious.
Hi Stuart—
Yeah, sometimes the absurdity of your work does strike me as funny. Or maybe it’s just anti-earnest, so there’s a kind of levity to it even when it addresses sad or difficult subject matter. (Also, I am glad to hear you find the writing process as excruciating as I do. And I vibe with your unhealthy means of motivation. Although I also feel compelled to tell you that you are “useful” just as you are, dude.)
I think of all the reviews of my story collection Mad Hope that mentioned that it was a book about grief and loss. Well, okay, I thought, but it was funny too, right? I mean, I thought I was being funny. But maybe at that point for me, grief was just background music. The gap between writerly conception and readerly reception is wide and mysterious. I guess one just never knows, does one?
I think the humour, or the drollness, in this book is delivered with the hamburger. In the opening you explain how in the past, whenever things got heavy you would throw a hamburger into a poem as a kind of emotional escape hatch.
For me, it is that unexpectedness—of image or language—that is funny/sad. It’s the reversal of expectations that sends my mind crawling back to the setup of the “joke” so I can better understand the punchline …
We are big fans of the animated sitcom/musical Bob’s Burgers in my house. Do you watch it? One of the things I appreciate about it—besides its commentary on contemporary family life and wacky musical numbers, is that it trucks in a type of humour that feels deeply uncynical in its recognition of the importance of human connection. Your book is pretty darn different from Bob’s Burgers, but it makes me feel like you honour that same connection. It’s a sweet little miracle.
I hope I’ve conveyed how much I loved The Book of Grief and Hamburgers. It makes me want to give you and the rest of the hurting world a hug. I think lots of people (including Alice Munroe) should read it.
Thank you so much for our conversation, Stuart—I really relished the opportunity to ketchup in such a beefy exchange. I hope I didn’t bungle any questions or get myself in a pickle. (K, stopping now.)
Heather,
Human connection is pretty much everything for me, so I’m glad you see that devotion in at least some of my writing. And I’ve never seen Bob’s Burgers, but now that I know it’s part musical, I am going to seek it out! I’m a sucker for musicals. In fact, you might be familiar with the blockbuster musical Forever Plaid that came out in the 1980s. I received several fan letters from people who’d seen it, but the guy who wrote it was a completely different Stuart Ross.
Although I haven’t been punctual, I have really enjoyed this conversation, Heather, as I enjoy all my conversations with you. It’s been a really busy few months, work-wise and otherwise, but I mustard up all my energy to give this serious thought. I’m trying to think of a pun with unyin and yang, but it’s just not working out.
Thanks so much for all your kind words and your attention to my book.
—Stuart
Heather Birrell
(she/her) is the author of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award–winning poetry collection, Float and Scurry, and two story collections: Mad Hope (a Globe and Mail top fiction pick for 2012) and I know you are but what am I? The Toronto Review of Books called Mad Hope “completely enthralling, and profoundly grounded in an empathy for the traumas and moments of relief of simply being human.” Other honours include the Journey Prize, the Edna Staebler Award, Arc Poetry Magazine’s Reader’s Choice award, and long-list selection for the CBC Poetry Prize. She believes that the expression of our most intimate, difficult stories is fundamental to how we understand and ultimately care for each other. Heather lives in Toronto with her mother, partner, two daughters, and a whoodle named Angus.