Flora
Flora is a travel writer and published author.
She lost both her parents before she turned 30.
“After my parents died I really needed to find personal experiences; I needed to read someone who was intense and visceral and pissed off and complicated. I needed to read a real person talking about stuff.
A lot of grief literature is from a therapy slant or a professional slant which is not a bad thing, but I was like ‘I don’t care! I don’t need to read that stuff!’ I felt like hell, I couldn’t stop crying, my face was as puffy as anything, I wanted to die.
I would find myself skim-reading the academia and finding the parts that had personality and I thought if that’s what’s important to me, that’s probably important to a lot of people.
I wrote a blog post and called it something like ‘both my parents died before I turned 30 – here’s how I deal with grief’ because I knew those articles had traction. It spiralled way more than I thought it would so I started writing something that would be a bigger piece of work.
The day the book came out I literally could not stop crying. It wasn’t good crying, it wasn’t relieved crying, it was terror crying. I was like ‘this is like putting my entire chest in an entire book and people are just going to know everything. What have I done? Was this a massive mistake? Oh my god.’
I sometimes feel a bit weird about doing it like ‘I’ve used my parents’ death for this’ but I have all these people saying ‘thank you so much for doing it’.
I had a stunning email from somebody saying that her dad had just died – and her Mum some years before - and she’d read my book and was so happy to find it.
And that’s the point.
That’s the reason I did it.
“I am insanely grateful that I love writing as much as I do - it’s not even loving writing actually, it's needing it. ”
When Mum got ill we had to call an ambulance at 3 in the morning and the first thing I did was grab my laptop and start writing down the details.
I needed to.
And because I was writing poetry a lot it was all very fragmented, all little inconsequential things, which now I can’t remember as my brain literally blocked it all out, so that stuff is gold for me.
I feel growth as a creator and I think it’s a good thing. I guess grief kind of got me to writing the way I do. I feel very humbled and weirdly privileged and the caveat is always weird, because however happy I am about it I’m like y’know…”
Find out more about Flora and her writing: www.floratheexplorer.com.
You can purchase a copy of her book The Adult Orphan Club here.
Written by Faye Dawson