Tembi Locke Wants You to Take a Good, Hard Look
The "From Scratch" author on why TV's close-up on grief matters, personal holiday traditions after loss, and the Jackson 5 song that means so much
Hi everyone,
Now that my fingers have started to thaw out from whatever the hell has been going on with this weather, I’m happy to be back in your inboxes (hopefully in an ‘opened’ state) after months of not being able to do the qualitative monthly work required for this project.
Turns out that being an author requires spending a lot of time promoting a book. Toss in being a one-woman team managing the entirety of the online Modern Loss community (which includes our publication and our social media accounts) and a parent with young kids during a tripledemic (is it only triple? I could swear it feels like a quintupledemic by this point??) ensures that eventually, something just has to give for a while.
Which is a shame. Because it brings me personal and professional satisfaction to share unique conversations with notable people who have something meaningful to say about the nuanced experience of loss and how the hell we get through it in one(ish) piece. I’ve missed it and am grateful to be back with our monthly dispatches.
I have been busy, though, doing this work in other ways, and would like to share a some updates of what’s been going on since the publication of The Modern Loss Handbook in May:
Before Twitter kind of, well, died, there was a thread going around with authors about how fewer than 1% of all published books sell more than 5,000 copies. The MLH has by far surpassed that number, and its third printing landed on bookshelves in late summer. It is available for free in libraries, included in university and writing program syllabi, on the shelves of mental health practitioners and physicians, and in independent bookstores as well as in big box ones. A very special thank you goes to The Harnisch Foundation for sending so many copies to members of the wonderful organization The Dinner Party. I hope you give it a try if you haven’t yet (and this time of year is a nice one to send a copy to someone who needs it).
I’ve met many of you IRL at my 41 — that’s forty one — events in the United States, Montreal, London, and even in Berlin and Milan. I’m keenly aware of the privilege I’ve had to emerge be able to travel around the world for a theme that many didn’t feel comfortable talking about until recently (and during several Covid-19 waves). It’s safe to say I’ve challenged myself to the absolute max: I’ve done public conversations with rock journalists and literal rock stars, with journalists and comedians I’ve admired for years, and with physicians at the top of their game in the palliative care and mental health fields. I’ve gotten to meet readers from myriad backgrounds and cultures. When you’re sitting in that solitary writing cave for months on end, you kind of wonder if you’re really reaching anyone. I’m humbled by how everyone has opened up about their stories and by what I’ve learned about the ripple effect of the Modern Loss movement: The Berliner who was inspired to start a monthly Zoom for people who had miscarriages and stillbirths after finding us online. The Milanese woman who included ML in her psychology dissertation and selflessly helped me figure out how to produce an event there. The man in San Francisco who said that the no-platitudes approach to grief from our contributors has been the thing that has enabled him to start having real conversations with his friends about what he’s been through.
At my final event of 2022 – the “inaugural” New York Jewish Book Festival (I know, how is that possible), where I was in conversation with the OG stylist Stacy London, I bumped into DR. RUTH, who is an absolute fireball of an international treasure and was more than happy to shoot the breeze about sex and grief. If only my grandmom could have seen that one. (Stay tuned because I’m trying to get her to come onto the newsletter!)
ML’s mission and community are broadly mentioned throughout media this month, including this New York Times piece on folding loss into your wedding planning, this Good Housekeeping piece on coping with grief during the holidays, and The Newsworthy podcast. You can also now watch my conversation with music journalist Pete Paphides recorded in London in October here:
And so, thank you, thank you, thank you for all of your support this year. I take not even one tiny bit of it for granted and as admittedly worn out as I may be at year’s end, I’m re-energized by the reminder of how life-affirming it is to talk about this stuff in community.
But back to why you’ve signed up for this thing. Below you’ll find a conversation with my friend Tembi Locke, whose TV adaptation of her gorgeous memoir From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home., starring Zoe Saldana and produced by Reese Witherspoon, has been consistently in Netflix’s Top 10 around the world this fall. We discussed some things that nobody else has asked about her experiences loving and losing her husband, Saro, so please read on (and if you want more, check out this piece she wrote for Modern Loss about that Sicilian journey cake). If you haven’t seen the show yet, it’s a work of sheer beauty.
Wishing you a safe, sane, meaningful and healthy holiday season, and hope you embrace JOMO (the joy of missing out) whenever you wake up feeling the need to pass on whatever holiday-time gathering is at hand but just doesn’t feel right in the moment. I’m a big fan of calling an audible.
See you in January.
— Rebecca Soffer
Tembi Locke on anticipatory grief and why we’re all primed to understand it now
REBECCA SOFFER: How do people talk about loss now versus in 2018, when you and I met at a grief conference in San Francisco, of all things? Like, we were the weird ones.
TEMBI LOCKE: [Laughs.] I flew myself up and was like, "Yeah, I just am going to spend my money and time hanging out with people talking about grief, when no one else in the world is."
SOFFER: No one.
LOCKE: Back then, when I was at a social gathering and would say, "Part of my advocacy work is around grief, end-of-life care, palliative care," people would go, "Oh," and change the subject. Today they say, "Oh, my mother, or last week I talked to, or I saw this show..." People are hungry for it, willing to walk into it. And I think a lot of that is the two years we passed in lockdown, watching the daily numbers in the ICUs, family deaths, friends’ deaths. We could not turn away.
SOFFER: And even if we tried to, we’d just see it in whichever new direction we were facing. There are just too many layers of loss out there now.
LOCKE: We were also witnessing the fragility and inequities of our medical systems. People saw a lot of things from their living rooms for two straight years. Now they're ready to have different conversations, they're more open. And that's really what we hoped to do with our show. I wrote the book and we’d already sold the show before we knew there would be a pandemic.
SOFFER: Are there any elements you might have shied away from in your pre-pandemic TV production plans?
LOCKE: It's probably the same thing that I almost shied away from in writing the book, which is the actual portrayal of walking someone up to their last breath. When you write about something, the reader can imagine in his or her own way what that looks like. When you translate it to screen, you have a choice: Do you allude to it and have the camera off in the corner looking at, let's say…
SOFFER: …a visual metaphor like a sunset or an empty bed?
LOCKE: Exactly. The viewer will fill in what has happened. We wanted to put the camera in a close-up and a medium shot on what that looks like, and we didn’t turn away. We were emboldened and committed to doing that, because I felt that was the purity of the purpose, of having, one, written the book, and the part of the story that is about sharing grief. Because the story is about what grief looks like: anticipatory grief, grief after loss, collective grief.
SOFFER: I think any other way would've rung hollow with regards to how you approached every other element of the story. I remember being aware of a feeling of heaviness in my own body after Lino’s surgery. Even though it was a successful procedure, I no longer felt the pure joy of the first few episodes, the exhilaration of when you guys fell in love and that dinner in Florence when, oh my God, you were just basically making love to each other at the restaurant through sheer looks.
Afterwards, when you were all going about life and your daughter was growing up, I feel like you really nailed that feeling of everyone waiting for the other shoe to drop that any of us who have been through something tough can relate to.
LOCKE: Thank you for sharing that. No one has talked to me specifically about that quality of the experience of watching it, but that's what anticipatory grief is. Everybody in the family, even while they’re shopping, or at someone's wedding, or picking their kid up from school, feels its presence. That is exactly what we were going for, and it’s a feeling that I lived with for so long; a kind of knowing in my bones. My greatest hope is that people who've seen the show are now aware of the weight that someone in their life might be carrying.
SOFFER: You got remarried over Zoom during Covid-19. Holidays are weird for people living with loss who are moving through the threshold into a new stage with new people but still pulling someone from the past. What do you normally do around this time of year?
LOCKE: I have all the ornaments that Saro and I used, including from our first Christmas together. When I do the tree, that is a quiet, ritualistic time for me, to sort of remember, reflect. There he is, every time I pass by it, there's that ornament, there's that picture of us, there’s that trip. I'm holding the totality of my lived experience and escorting it into the holiday season, and I talk openly talk about the stories.
We light candles and I say a prayer. Sometimes Robert [Tembi’s husband] or Zoela [Tembi and Saro’s daughter] is present, sometimes I just do it on my own. But those are ways that ground me. The other thing I try to do is really slow things down between Christmas and New year.
SOFFER: That magical week where you don't even know what day it is, what time it is.
LOCKE: Yes. That’s when a lot of the emotion comes up for me, and I may tell people, "Hey, I just need to take a walk by myself," or "If I'm crying, it's going to be about this and let's talk about it."
My daughter gets gifts from her dad every year. Sometimes I pick them out, sometimes a family member picks them out. Robert's a part of it. We all honor that Saro is present in our lives; he is her dad. We are trying to model for her a way to integrate the wholeness of her life, and her life story at Christmas. So much of the holiday season is about our past, our memories, our nostalgia. We have to find a way to bring those two things together. One year we made a playlist of all of his favorite songs, so she could play all of his favorite music, whatever she wanted to.
SOFFER: Did you and Saro have a favorite holiday song?
LOCKE: I foisted a lot of R&B soul Christmas on him. By the end he was down with the corniest one of all, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus by the Jackson Five. He thought that is the most saccharine, corny, ridiculous piece of music, and yet he could appreciate it.
SOFFER: I'm going to include a link to that at the end of this piece so that everyone can have a bit of Saro with them.
LOCKE: Please do.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.