‘Loved One’ Author Aisha Muharrar on Writing a Fun Novel About Grief

How did the seed of Julia, Gabe, and Elizabeth’s story come to you?

I was in New York, in a cab with my friend leaving a party, and during the cab ride, she told me that a friend of hers was dating my ex-boyfriend. That ex of mine really was a good boyfriend—we had a fine, amicable little breakup—and she said that she’d recommended him based on my experience. But now her friend was not having a good time—like, he wasn’t being a good boyfriend to her. I was like, “I’m not Yelp for boyfriends!” But that made me think: that was my experience with him, but it’s been a few years. Maybe he’s changed. Maybe the dynamic of that relationship is contributing. It was just interesting to me to think, Oh, we dated the same person, but if we were in a room together, would our experiences overlap?

That was years before I started the book, but it was in the back of my mind, and then when Parks ended, I had always wanted to write prose fiction—that’s what I’d gone to college with the intention of doing. I ended up with this great job [writing for television], but I’d been wanting to write a book since I was a kid. I wrote a nonfiction book in high school, but I really wanted to write a novel. It kind of felt like, why not do it now? It was just after we’d wrapped this show I really cared about, I didn’t have kids or anything, I had just gotten married, and I thought: Well, now is the time to do it. That’s when the cab conversation came back into my mind.

I’d already been thinking about loss, just because of my personal experiences with loss, and I talked to a friend who lost her grandfather, and she was aware that I had a few people close to me pass away. She said that I was the “expert in grief,” which wasn’t, like, a great moniker, but I thought, Okay, well, maybe there is something to explore here. There are so many books about grief now, but at the time when I started writing, I wasn’t really seeing that in literary fiction. There were memoirs about grief, but I wanted to write something about grief that, if you were going through a loss, you would read it and not feel further depressed, or it wouldn’t make you feel worse.