Where the Story Began: How Monarch of the Heart Came to Life

Monarch of the Heart grew out of more than twenty years of learning what grief can look like, the sudden death of my father when I was twenty-six, the loss of my best friend to addiction, two divorces, the second from a man I loved, and, most recently, a mother who is alive but no longer reachable. People assume a novel about grief comes from one great loss. Mine came from many, gathered slowly over a lifetime, and some of the heaviest were the ones no one thinks to send flowers for. This is where the story began.

Where did Monarch of the Heart begin?

With my dad. I was twenty-six when he died, suddenly, while I was on my honeymoon, two days after he walked me down the aisle. That kind of loss does not close over. It reshapes you.

In the searching that followed, I found Día de Muertos, or Day of the Dead, and I built my first ofrenda for him. Setting out his photographs and the things he loved gave me a way to keep him close, to keep his seat at the table. It was the beginning of a practice that would carry me through everything that came after.

How did the ofrenda grow?

Grief, it turns out, does not visit once and leave. As the years went on and I lost more of the people I loved, my ofrenda grew with me. Each new face added to it. Each new name spoken aloud again every fall. What began as a single act of missing my dad became a yearly gathering of everyone I carry.

Sandy, who never reached the starting line

One of the hardest additions was my best friend, Sandy.

Sandy was days away from a bed in rehab when alcoholism took her. Days. She never made it to the starting line of recovery, the same starting line I was lucky enough to cross. More than twenty-five years into my own sobriety, I still carry a truth that is hard to hold. I made it out, and she did not. For a long time the guilt of that nearly buried me.

What I have learned to do instead is carry her. I keep Sandy with me, along with the spirit of every alcoholic and addict still out there suffering, still hoping to reach a starting line of their own. Her memory is one of the reasons this book exists. I wrote more about Sandy, and about what survival asks of us, in my sobriety story.

What is the grief that no one calls grief?

The true spark for Monarch of the Heart came from a different kind of loss entirely, one with no funeral at all.

My marriage was complicated in the ways love usually is, and my divorce from a man I loved was one of the most painful losses of my life. It was not a physical death, but it felt like one. I was grieving the death of who I had been, the wife and partner I believed I was, and the entire future I had imagined alongside a person who would no longer be in it. You mourn the life that was supposed to happen. You mourn the version of yourself who believed it would. That grief, and the reinvention that followed, became its own story.

And running quietly underneath all of it was another ongoing loss, my mother. She is still living, and we have not spoken in years. She is no longer reachable, no longer the woman who raised me, and I have made a hard peace with the fact that I will never get my mom back. There is a specific ache to grieving a person who is still here. It has a name, ambiguous grief, and I have written about it on its own.

Why Mexico?

I did not know how to hold that much grief, gathered over so many years and of so many different kinds, until I went to Mexico. In Mixquic, in the marigold markets, in the hand-carved alebrijes and the ofrendas glowing in the dark, I found a culture that does not look away from death. Instead it is one that sits down at the table with it. That dresses it in vibrant colors and calls the dead home by name.

Mexico gave me a place to set my grief down and finally look at it. Día de Muertos gave me a language for it. And slowly, out of all of that, a novel took shape, a woman arriving in Mexico City carrying a loss more complicated than anyone around her knew.

What is the book really about?

Monarch of the Heart is about the many faces of grief, the deaths we bury and the ones we do not, and the courage it takes to keep becoming yourself in the aftermath of losing so much. The monarch, for transformation. The marigold, for remembrance. The heart, for love. All three are tattooed on my skin, woven into my brand, and carried through every chapter, because they are the truest things I know, that we are able to change, that the ones we love are worth remembering, and that love outlasts even the strangest kinds of loss.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because the emotion in these pages is not invented. I lived every layer of it. When you read this book, you are not reading grief imagined from a safe distance. You are reading grief I know by heart. That is the only kind of story I know how to tell. If you want to see whether it is yours, you can read the first chapter free.

With much love for the journey,

Carrie

This piece touches addiction, loss, and grief. If you are struggling with addiction or grief of your own, please know that support is available and you do not have to carry it alone.