‘Judaism gets how to keep people alive after they die’ - The Jewish Chronicle

A 17-year-old girl rides her bike home from school one day. She gets home and things are a little off – doors are locked, TVs and phones don’t work, her memory is off – and when her mother comes home and screams, she understands why. She died seven years before, while riding her bike home from school.

This was the vision that inspired Brooklyn-based author Gayle Forman to write her latest YA novel, After Life. It explores the effect teenage Amber’s death and reappearance has – and not only on her immediate family. It relates the surprising and far-flung impact it has on others – even a homeless dog. We asked Forman about the influences behind the book.

Family is an important focus of the novel. What does family mean to you?

My own family consists of me, my husband (not Jewish but Jewish adjacent) and my three daughters, one of whom is mine biologically and legally, another who is mine legally but not biologically and a third who is neither mine legally or biologically but is my daughter.

Family to me is expansive, and not just biological. Opening my home to strangers who become friends who sometimes become family is the heart of who I am. I was so glad to write a book like After Life, which celebrates family.

Amber’s dad has a religious epiphany on her return. Why does he respond in this way?

That was always a central conflict I wanted to play with. Amber’s mother and father have very different views on faith and they manage to navigate that for years, until there is a crisis and Amber’s mother loses her faith and her father grows angry at a god he doesn’t even believe in. So when Amber returns, it further complicates that…

I was raised in a Reform household and went to Jewish day school as a kid but kind of rejected Judaism for a few years in there, coming back to it when a friend asked to co-host a Seder and I understood how the faith was a living, breathing, evolving code that had very much informed my ethical and moral sense. I’m not the most observant Jew in the world but I feel like my Jewishness runs through every fibre of who I am and informs everything I write, even when I’m not writing about Jewish characters… I had two books come out within the last year, After Life and Not Nothing, which I don’t think was published in the UK, and they are very different. Not Nothing is about the friendship between a 12-year-old boy who did something really bad and a 107-year-old Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor, but both books really feel like the culmination of how my Jewish outlook makes me see the world.

My Jewishness runs through every fibre of who I am and informs everything I write, even when I’m not writing about Jewish characters

Do you think it’s hard for young people to believe in religion these days?

Young people, and older people, have always been able to believe in things that maybe don’t make a lot of sense. Swap religion for manifesting or for QAnon conspiracy theories and see that adherents are growing. Maybe young people are more attuned to rejecting some of the things that people have done in the name of religion, which I get because people use faith as an excuse for violence or oppression, but really they are just fixating on the violence and oppression. I think people are thirsty to believe in something bigger than them, that joins them to others and sometimes this desire does great good, and other times, not so much.

In a way, After Life revisits the territory of your YA bestseller If I Stay. If I Stay is narrated by Mia, who is hovering between life and death following a car accident. She has to decide if she wants to live. How would you say the two books interrelate?

If I Stay was based on the loss of four friends of mine, a family that was killed in a car accident. That led to a spiritual awakening of sorts that culminated in writing a book brought them back alive to me. I began to question this idea that life and death are separated by this thick wall you cannot traverse. I began to understand how love for someone keeps them around after they’ve gone, which means that love can make you immortal. I wanted to expand that idea into a new book and that book became, 16 years after If I Stay, After Life.

Your books are sometimes called “tearjerkers” but to me they celebrate life rather than death. Do you think that’s so?

I am so glad you said that because, yes, I write tearjerkers but I don’t write “sad-girl” books and I hate torture-porn books that put characters through the wringer just to wring out some tears of the reader. Ugh. Fear of the unknown can be so paralysing, and I think many people are so scared of what will happen when life inevitably drops tragedy in their wake, as it will.

I write books in which characters have these worst things happen and yes, they hurt, deeply, but the characters discover strength and grace and joy and meaning – and, by extension, I do like to think, so do readers. And that’s a huge cathartic relief that elicits tears. We know novels can help readers build empathy, but research suggests they also can help build resilience for just these reasons.

What message would you like young readers to take away from After Life?

The way to keep someone alive after they have died is to keep their memory alive by speaking and honouring them. Judaism gets this. “May their memory be a blessing”, our customary refrain upon hearing of someone’s death, literally instructs us to do that.

After Life is out now

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