My father died unex­pect­ed­ly from com­pli­ca­tions of a rou­tine surgery in Octo­ber 2016. I was twen­ty-nine at the time and on the go in New York City, work­ing by day at a Jew­ish non­prof­it and, by night, attempt­ing to be a play­wright. His death came as the sin­gle great­est shock of my life. My father had been my lodestar — the per­son who’d shaped me the most, who’d nur­tured my pas­sions, who’d exposed me to films, plays, books, and art (and the Yan­kees). Now, with­out warn­ing, he was gone. 

I retreat­ed to my one-square-mile home­town in north­ern New Jer­sey to be with my dis­traught moth­er and sit shi­va; we per­formed the rit­u­als of mourn­ing and received the con­do­lences of fam­i­ly and friends. And then, short­ly after — far too short­ly, in ret­ro­spect — I did what any twen­tysome­thing bud­ding drama­tist who’d lost a beloved par­ent and didn’t know how to cope might do: I wrote a messy play about the whole ordeal. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, this mis­be­got­ten project nev­er amount­ed to much; the piece had a cou­ple of pub­lic read­ings and soon fiz­zled out, as it should have. The expe­ri­ence was still too raw and painful for me to make any kind of artis­tic sense of it. I was fran­ti­cal­ly writ­ing, instead of giv­ing myself space to grieve. 

Flash for­ward more than six years to the begin­ning of 2023. I was thir­ty-five now, mar­ried, and, won­der of won­ders, liv­ing in the Mid­west, where I’d relo­cat­ed after meet­ing my wife. I found myself in a reflec­tive mood, maybe because it was the start of a new year, and some­thing told me I should final­ly try to revis­it the thorny sub­ject of grief — though not in a play this time, but in the less con­strained form of prose. So, on a cold Jan­u­ary night, I sat down and typed the first sen­tence of what would become my debut nov­el, Cam­my Sit­ting Shi­va: ​“Cam­my was adrift at a par­ty the night her dad died.” And sure enough, I real­ized that, with the dual ben­e­fit of dis­tance and per­spec­tive, I at last had the capac­i­ty to con­front the loss of my father while trans­form­ing that loss into fic­tion that could stand on its own two feet — fic­tion leav­ened by irony and, yes, even abun­dant humor.

This ele­ment of humor is the core of why, to me, Cam­my Sit­ting Shi­va is a deeply Jew­ish book. The sto­ry cen­ters on a young Jew­ish woman going home to sit shi­va for her father. But Cam­my is no pious pro­tag­o­nist. To the con­trary, she’s a bit of a train wreck, behav­ing out­ra­geous­ly to escape her grief and bristling at the stric­tures of rit­u­al and reli­gion — as embod­ied by the earnest Rab­bi Wiener — with sar­don­ic wit. Yet this dark­ly com­ic response to tragedy, this irre­press­ible urge to quar­rel with God, is, I think, part of a rich Jew­ish tra­di­tion of skep­ti­cism and argu­ment — a tra­di­tion woven into Cammy’s ​“act­ing out” and her con­tin­u­ous stream of quips and com­plaints. In this way, I hope the nov­el is rev­er­ent in its irreverence. 

Ulti­mate­ly, by the end of the fraught week of shi­va — after screw­ing up roy­al­ly and alien­at­ing every­one close to her — Cam­my is able to find some peace and a path for­ward through a sort of spir­i­tu­al reck­on­ing at her father’s grave. And I, too, found some­thing through the writ­ing of this book. Though I wasn’t ful­ly aware of it dur­ing the near­ly year­long draft­ing process, I rec­og­nized after­ward, in read­ing over the man­u­script, what I was real­ly doing all along: I was reliv­ing my father’s death and its after­math, from the safer van­tage of hind­sight, to seek the clo­sure I nev­er attained the first time around. I was ren­der­ing the chaot­ic expe­ri­ence as a coher­ent sto­ry. And per­haps most impor­tant­ly, I was craft­ing my own mod­est lit­er­ary memo­r­i­al to my late father. 

On the verge of the pub­li­ca­tion of Cam­my Sit­ting Shi­va, I think of the cus­tom­ary Jew­ish say­ing upon someone’s pass­ing: ​“May their mem­o­ry be a bless­ing.” A sim­ple, elo­quent phrase that avoids mawk­ish­ness while evok­ing how our loved ones remain with us after they depart, how their lega­cy con­tin­ues to inform and guide us. I think of my father bring­ing home books from the pub­lic library when I was a child and leav­ing them on my bed for me to dis­cov­er — just one of the myr­i­ad ways he encour­aged my love of words, of expres­sion, of sto­ry­telling. I imag­ine how he might feel know­ing that a nov­el large­ly inspired by him will now live on library shelves for oth­ers to dis­cov­er. As I linger on this bit­ter­sweet notion, a slight vari­a­tion on the famil­iar bene­dic­tion comes to mind, a vari­a­tion that con­jures the endur­ing pow­er of text as tes­ta­ment: ​“May his mem­o­ry be a book.”