Amy Bloom is an American writer and psychotherapist. She has written four novels and five collections of short stories, including Love Invents Us, Lucky Us and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. Her memoir, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss , is a searing account of her journey with her husband, Brian Ameche, to Dignitas in Switzerland to end his life after he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Alongside the heartbreak, your book is mordantly funny. How did you locate the humour in what you were going through?
I didn’t so much locate it as just swim in it, which I think is in my nature. When you’re going through something really hard, you have to have time to cry but there are also things that are just too funny and I don’t feel it takes away from the sadness or the grief to find them funny. I think it’s an important quality to be woven into the story. One of my favourite exchanges with Brian, which I have in the book, is when he told me that he would prefer it if we could just find a way for me to end his life when the time came. And I’m like, I don’t know, I’m not sure I can do that emotionally. Also, it’s illegal and I would go to jail. He was very disappointed and then he said to me: “You’d be great in jail. You’re such a leader.” That did make us both laugh.
It was Brian who first urged you to write this memoir. Why?
He always cared about the principles around the right to die and the right to life. An expression of that was that he was very active at Planned Parenthood, where he escorted women from their car into the clinic once a week. It was important to him that people should be able to choose how they live their lives and he wanted what we were going through not just to be our project and our journey together, which was the very private part, he also wanted it to be useful to other people.
Did you worry about how readers would react to the book, given the heated debate around accompanied dying?
Sure, I mean nobody likes to be judged unless you’re going to get a prize and a flower at the end of the process. But I have gotten hundreds and hundreds of emails from palliative care nurses, physicians, hospice workers, from people who say, let me tell you what happened to me and my husband, let me tell you about my wife, let me tell you about my mother. And all of them, whether or not they made a similar decision to ours, are so supportive and so appreciative and also so concerned about the choices that face people because they’re so limited. So that was very touching and moving.
Your writing is wonderfully spare, even though you’re dealing with such an emotive subject. Would you say less is more when writing about death and dying?
I think less is more when writing about anything. I’m a big Chekhov fan, right? And he says, in order to write more warmly, write more coolly. And that’s how I feel about it. I’m in general, a pretty short, spare writer; I don’t think I’ve ever written over a word limit in my entire life.
How does your role as a psychotherapist feed into your role as a writer and vice versa?
I don’t think they do feed each other very much because one is really a pretty self-centred project, you know. I write because I have stuff I want to say. Whereas when I’m doing therapy, it’s really in service to other people. It’s about somebody else’s narrative and how I can help them manage something or understand something in a way that might be useful to them. The only overlap is probably in my temperament, in that the only thing that really interests me is people. I mean, I have a minor interest in gardening. But really, it’s people. When I go to an art gallery, I look at the portraits.
You were unable to write fiction during Brian’s final months. Can you write again now?
I’m actually working on a novel very slowly. The only book of my life I’ve ever written quickly was the memoir. I imagine I will go back to my usual tortoise-like pace in the future. But I feel like I’m able to engage with my work again and also there’s a real push within me, which I think is very much a result of Brian’s life and his death, to be more observant and spend a little more time with the sunset, with the sunrise, with the water as it laps against the shore – just to be willing to give an extra five minutes.
What is the best memoir you have ever read?
A book called The Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff, Tobias Wolff’s big brother, which is extraordinary, witty, comprehensive, very moving and smart about his very difficult relationship with his very difficult father. It’s probably now lost in the mists of time but, hey, I feel like my real job in life should have been the clerk in the dusty, obscure bookstore, blowing the dust off the book and pressing it on slightly unwilling readers.
Is there an author that you return to time and again?
There are lots of them. I don’t read a lot of fiction when I am writing, but I do read a lot of poetry. So, Auden, Emily Dickinson, certainly the Janes, Jane Kenyon and Jane Hirshfield. I also really like Larkin, Mark Doty, Carl Phillips, Louise Glück. There’s no shortage. When I am reading fiction Jane Austen doesn’t ever let me down, nor does William Trevor.
What sort of reader were you as a child?
When I was a kid, the job that I was aiming for was to be a professional reader. I thought people could just give me books and then, maybe at the end of the week, I could make a little book report and then I would get paid. I was very disappointed to find out that was not an actual job.
What you do now is surely the next best thing…
It is, although writing is more work than reading. I prefer the job where it’s less work and it’s all pleasure and experience, not a lot of staring at the keyboard, muttering darkly.
• In Love by Amy Bloom is published in paperback by Granta Books (£9.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
