Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Devon Capizzi writes about My Share of the Body from Split/Lip Press.

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Some People Get Hit by Trucks and Die

When my dad was killed in a car accident in October 2017, I started writing about him almost immediately. I have always kept journals, as a kid and throughout high school. I still have most of them alongside stacks of notebooks from college, class notes and personal dramas seamlessly intertwined. A scattered record of my life.

My dad was killed three days after my birthday, and the two events have grown more or less synonymous. As I get older, and presumably wiser, I also get farther and farther from him. As I take one step forward, it feels like my dad takes two steps back, shrinking away, getting smaller and smaller until he’s entirely out of sight.

A month before his death, I started an MFA program in creative writing. It was either the best or the worst time to get a master’s. I’m honestly still not sure. On the one hand, I was reeling from losing him. I was totally out of control. On the other, I had three years ahead of me to write.

Early in the program, I started referring to my work, affectionately, as my Dead Dad Stories. I was working on a bunch of stories that would become my graduate thesis that would become this collection, My Share of the Body. Dead Dad Stories. You’re supposed to name the things you fear so they become less scary. I ran that phrase through my head for months — dead dad, dead dad, dead dad, dead dad. Like an incantation.

I wrote my first Dead Dad Story the week he was killed. It was my second-ever workshop submission. The following semester, I wrote my second about the boy who killed him. His real-life name is Wayne, a homegrown-Pennsylvania-boy name. I’ve tried many times to look him up with no success. His name is too ordinary.

Instead, I pictured him the way I remember almost any boy from my hometown. All buzzcut, and dirty canvas workpants, and steel-toed boots thumping through suburban homes with Yankee Candles. When I presented the Wayne story to workshop, which followed a truck driver who gets into an accident and kills a man, my classmates told me it was too predictable. They knew he would get into an accident. They knew he would kill somebody. Stubbornly, I insisted they were wrong, but deeper down, I knew the story wasn’t right. A month later, I would discover Mt. Eerie via recommendation from my brother. In their song, “Now Only,” singer-songwriter Phil Elverum sings, “Some people get cancer and die. Some people get hit by trucks and die,” like it’s a fact of life, because it is. As ordinary as going to the grocery store, or not going to the grocery store. Like going to the movies, or deciding to stay home. Some people get hit by trucks, and some of them live and some of them die. My dad had died.

Over time, I stopped seeing his death as something exceptional and started to see it more for what it was: a horrible thing that had happened to me, and to my family, and to him. This new simplicity felt truer than the earlier, sensational versions of my grieving. Our story was not about this tragic event. The event was almost incidental — it was an inciting incident. An inciting incident is not a story. A story is what happens after. What happened after is that I wrote a lot of really bad Dead Dad Stories, until I could find out what was living underneath the shock and awe.

By my final year at Emerson, I had worked my way to a place not quite divorced from my dad’s death but no longer entirely defined by it either. I wrote the title story, “My Share of the Body,” in my second year, a quieter story about losing a father and about family, and about bodies and what happens to them when we die. And I started writing stories that are not about dead dads at all.

Eventually, the book I was writing was no longer a book of Dead Dad Stories, and neither was I, so to speak. During this time, I also fell in love, and worked three jobs, and made new friends and cooked for them and drank with them and talked about writing and life with them. I walked a lot. I cried a lot, especially at night when I was tired and missing him. I watched a lot of movies. I wrote.

This book is all of that, and it also is none of that. Not really. After years of writing and rewriting these stories, this book is not my life anymore; it’s a book. Grieving is a process of endless revision. Writing is, too.

For a long time, I wrote this book desperately. I think, at first, I was writing these stories as a way of writing myself closer and closer to him. As a way of insisting that this thing that had happened was as unfair and awful as I felt it was. But now, I know that isn’t possible — to write myself closer to him, or to insist that this thing matters to other people the same way it matters to me. Because I can hold the book in my hands, and my dad is still dead. And while I hope these stories resonate with fellow mourners, I know each reader will be thinking of their own lost people. Not mine.

I am grateful for this book. For years, it saved me from much deeper depths of despair, because it was a place to turn to when I needed it. And I really needed it.

Now, it is a thing out in the world, and it is surreal, and beautiful, and a little sad to let it go. Because I am still left with the thing that has always lived just a little to the left of what I was writing here. The grieving does not stop, when you put it in a story.

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