People sometimes ask me how I got through the hardest part, and I never have a good answer ready. I freeze a little. Not because it’s too painful to say out loud — because the honest answer isn’t a thing you say. It’s a thing you do.
You move.
Not through it, exactly. Around it, alongside it, out the door and onto a plane with your bag half-packed. The closest thing I’ve found to a cure was never standing still. It was motion — and it was letting other people pull me into their lives until I was too busy belonging to stay stuck.
That’s about as close as I get to a philosophy: a stuck life needs to be absorbed back into a moving one. Pulled out the door. Claimed by something. And it doesn’t have to be grief that stopped you — it can be a divorce, a job, a rut you can’t name, or just the quiet set of a life that stopped surprising you. The fix is the same. Somewhere to go, and someone who’s decided you belong there.
I’ve now written two books about exactly this. It took me a while to notice they were the same book wearing different clothes.
One true, one invented
The first is a memoir. Good Grief Travel is my own story — the plainest version, my name on the cover — about a life that reopened because I bought a plane ticket I had no business buying, and went. It runs from the roar of Chongqing to the glass water of the Maldives, but the real distance it covers is the one back into my own life. I wrote more about how that book came to be here.
The second is a novel, and I wrote it under a different name: Beau Griffin. Greg, He’s Fine is about a man named Greg Pendleton, who has a laminated packing list, a carry-on he researched for a month, and a backup jar of Folgers for a hotel that already has coffee. By every measure he keeps — and he keeps several — Greg is fine. Then a Filipino family in Manila claims him, without asking, until he’s at a long table in a sash being called Tito Greg, and a life he’d sealed up tight cracks quietly back open. I wrote about telling that story here.
Greg isn’t me. But Greg needed the exact thing I did — to be absorbed into a life bigger and warmer and messier than the one he was managing so carefully. That’s the whole reason there are two books instead of one. It’s the same medicine at two different doses: once true, once invented. Because being pulled back into the world is what we all need — fictional or otherwise.
Why two names
About that second name. Beau Griffin isn’t a marketing alias. It’s my two boys’ names, fused into one.
Which means the name I chose for a story about a man getting claimed by a family is itself made of the family that claimed me. I didn’t do it to hide behind a character. I did it because when I think honestly about what pulled me back into the world, it was them. The pen name is the thesis in miniature — even the distance is built out of the people who kept me close.
And here’s the part I didn’t plan, the one I only caught after the last page. In the novel, the shove that starts everything comes from Greg’s son, Tyler, who texts him before a Manila trip: Dad, try to actually do something this time. Have an adventure. I wrote that line without once noticing whose voice it really was. Because my own boys had said very nearly the same thing to me, in almost the same breath. Mine told me to go be James Bond.
So I built the pen name out of my boys on purpose — and then wrote their voice into the book without meaning to. Same mirror, twice: one I chose, and one I didn’t see until I looked up from the ending.
The most literal version of the cure
Which brings me to the two reader’s guides, and why I care that they exist at all.
A book-club guide is a strange little object when you stop and look at it. It’s a book turning itself into a reason for people to gather — to sit around a table, ideally a long one, and talk and disagree and absorb each other for an evening. For these two books, that isn’t a marketing add-on. It’s the whole point, made literal. Movement and community, in the form of a few folding chairs and a discussion question.
So if either story lands for you, the best thing you can do with it isn’t to shelve it. It’s to hand it to a few people and get in a room. Both guides are free to download:
→ Read the Good Grief Travel reader’s guide (PDF)
→ Read the Greg, He’s Fine reader’s guide (PDF)
Where this lands
I don’t have a tidy thing to say about loss. I told you — I freeze when people ask. But I know exactly what moved me when nothing else could, and I’ve now written it twice, once as memory and once as fiction, because it’s the truest thing I’ve got: you don’t heal by holding still and waiting to feel better. You heal by going somewhere, and by letting people fold you into their lives until you look up one day and find you’re in the middle of your own again.
The cure was never standing still. It never is — not for me, not for Greg, and not, I suspect, for you.
Both books, and both guides, live on the Books page — if you’d like to start moving.
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