Nora McInerny’s second memoir, No Happy Endings (released Tuesday), opens with the author giving a talk before an audience about what she called “the most painful period of my life: how my husband and father died just weeks after my miscarriage,” in 2014. Though the discussion was aptly titled “Owning Your Own Story,” that day McInerny was admittedly hiding a big part of hers: A year and a half after losing her husband, Aaron, to brain cancer at age 35, she was expecting a baby with her new boyfriend, Matthew. When an audience member asked her, point-blank, if she was pregnant, McInerny froze.
“She was giving me a chance to tell everyone about my happy ending, about how the struggle and the loss was all worth it,” McInerny writes. “But that’s oversimplifying the narrative.”
In No Happy Endings, her follow-up to 2016’s It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool, Too), that narrative spills out in all of its complicated glory: an alternately funny and wrenching (but mostly funny?) as well as brutally frank story of life after death. In McInerny’s case—no spoilers for the many who follow @noraborealis on Instagram and listen to her podcast, “Terrible, Thanks for Asking”—that’s meant marrying Matthew and blending their families, including his two older children and Ralph, the now-6-year-old son she and Aaron chose to have even as Aaron was dying.
But the memoir also shatters the societal urge to tie grief up with pretty ribbons or brand it as a singular event from which to “move on” and attain “closure.” For McInerny, joy and sorrow are forever intertwined, and love never dies. It only grows and takes on new forms. In No Happy Endings, McInerny simultaneously makes room in her heart for her “current husband,” Matthew, and her late husband, Aaron (with whom she cowrote his unconventional, viral obituary). She also reckons with the fact that so much of her success—including her podcast and three books (The Hot Young Widows Club, a how-to named after the online support group she cofounded, is due in April)—was born out of her worst moments.
“Yes, I have a life I love,” she writes, “and a life I miss.”
Vogue spoke with McInerney by phone from Minneapolis about changing the conversation around grief, lust after loss, and how Girl, Wash Your Face might not be the best guide to life.
Vogue: The book opens with you onstage, speaking at an event about loss, and you’re hiding—or maybe just not mentioning—the fact that you’re pregnant. Why?
Nora McInerny: Straight-up hiding. I was having a hard time resolving the fact that a year and a half after Aaron died, I was just really starting to come out of shock and feel the deeper effects of grief. . .and was also falling in love/joining families with [Matthew]. The short answer is complete shame, thinking, “Well, if I am in love with [Matthew], then I guess I’m done with Aaron.” And that comes from a language of grief that includes words like “closure” and “moving on,” words that are really tidy, convenient language for the actual messiness of your life experience, which is that you will feel all these things at once.
Vogue: Was there a standard of how you thought you were supposed to be acting as a young, grieving widow?
McInerny: Part of the challenge of living according to other people’s expectations is that they are subject to change without notice. I was too sad for some people; I was not sad enough for other people. Somebody could catch you on a day when you are truly struggling, and they really don’t want to see that. They want to be able to give the world the report that, “She’s doing great. Wow. What an inspiration.” I really internalized all of those expectations. I personally did not have an example for what grief really looks like.
Vogue: What was—is—missing from the popular conversation about grief in America?
McInerny: Some cultures maintain a beautiful, healing version of it. America doesn’t have time or space for that. Like, HR has a bereavement policy. Those words probably don’t belong together. When your husband dies, you get, maybe, three to five paid days off. And that’s assuming that you have a salaried job. It’s bizarre, and it’s kind of disgusting. My friend Moe is a hairstylist. She had to work two days after her husband killed himself because if she doesn’t cut hair, she doesn’t get paid. We really do expect people to keep going through the motions of someone who is fine, even though we know that there’s no way they could be.
Vogue: So, what is the reality of what grief actually looks like? What should more people understand about it?
McInerny: It truly is this chronic condition. The other day I was like, “I don’t think that there will ever be a day where I don’t think of [Aaron], ever.” And not just because of the way he died or that he died, but that kind of love—I was very, very, very lucky to have that. And it completely gave me a foundation to be able to have another productive love and to show my kids that kind of love.
Vogue: One of the big takeaways of the book is that loss, and finding love after loss, is not a linear progression. You didn’t “get over” Aaron and “move on” with Matthew. In fact, you write that you still love both of your husbands. I don’t think that’s something that a lot of people admit, maybe because of fragile male feelings?
McInerny: It’s such a small way to look at love, and that’s kind of the reaction I get all the time. People being like, “Oh, wow. How does Matthew deal with it?” “Oh, he’s such a good guy.” I’m like, “For what?”
Vogue: There seems to be a lot of presumption that your current husband, Matthew, would be jealous of your dead husband, Aaron.
McInerney: Yeah, it’s very strange. And what I value so much about my family is being able to be reminded every day that real love should make you bigger and should make your heart bigger. And if it makes it smaller, it’s not love. If loving this other person means less for someone else, then what you’re feeling is not love, it’s possession, and I want all the kids to know that. All of these kids, their family grew exponentially.
Vogue: Did you ever talk to Aaron about getting married again?
McInerny: We joked about it, because my dad was dying at the same time Aaron was, and my dad was like, “You have to help your mom with her Match.com profile. It’s not very good.” They’d been married 40 years. Aaron and I never really discussed it because I think it just was too much. Obviously, we were still young, so, statistically speaking, I was not going to be alone for the rest of my life. But he’d be like, “I will always be with you, you really need to shut the door when you pee.” Or, “You need to stop picking your nose.” Some people are like, “Oh, did he leave notes for [Ralph] for the future?” He was like, “What am I going to write? ‘Hey, Happy Birthday. I’m still dead’?”
Vogue: One of the best parts of the book is when you write that even as you were grieving in the months after Aaron died, you were feeling a lot of lust and wanting to have sex with someone. You’re still a human being with desires. It felt revolutionary for someone to say that.
McInerny: [I was like], I want someone to kill spiders in my house and I want intimacy but I want you to want nothing of me. I want you to love me while I give you nothing. You know how hard it is to be on a dating app anyway, and then to be like, “Okay, so I do owe you a little bit of backstory. There’s something you should know about me in case I do something weirdly emotional, but also, I don’t want your pity.” That was never a fruitful endeavor for me.
Vogue: You write about good things happening in your life after loss. You wouldn’t have your current family of six had Aaron not died. You’ve had a lot of success in your career and been able to help a lot of people through the Hot Young Widows Club and your nonprofit, Still Kickin. How do you add that all up, if you even can?
McInerny: That is an eternal struggle. It’s absolutely true that if Aaron were alive, I would not be with Matthew. I would not have written this book. Is this a silver lining to Aaron dying? No. That, to me, falls into that same sort of tidy explanation. And trust me, I love tidy explanations. I’m a lazy writer. I think it’s all strands to the same thread. It’s all tied up together and we don’t know, if you pull at one thing, what the result will be. [My stepdaughter] Sophie had to make a family tree at school, and on Sophie’s family tree are my dad and Aaron. And my mom and Aaron’s mom are on there. She brought it home, and I’m looking at it, like, “That’s so cool.”
Vogue: Your work seems to be shifting the way we talk about grief—opening it up to more nuance and complexity, and humor. Do you feel the discussion is changing?
McInerny: It might be, but all of the awareness and conversation really doesn’t mean shit when we don’t have a way to catch people when they fall. Which, by the way, we all will. It doesn’t matter how many books I publish about this if the reality is still that most Americans don’t have $500 to cover an emergency. I would love to have a $500 emergency, but in my experience, there are commas involved in emergencies. And then, “Oh my God, how do I pay for this? What happens to my husband’s debt?” God, you really caught me on a negative day.
Vogue: Well, now that we’re on the topic: How did you deal with that fall after Aaron’s death, in terms of your job and bills and everything?
McInerny: I ended up quitting my job, and that was not necessarily a smart move, but there was no part of me that was going to be capable. That part of me was gone, and I didn’t know how long it would take for her to come back. Aaron had, basically, no life insurance. But people had set us up a fundraising site. And it was a lot, like $100,000. That’s Aaron’s salary for a year. I paid for his funeral, I paid off his medical bills. Then I had such an immense sense of guilt for having this money. I would go to fundraising sites at night when I was probably pretty drunk, but also just an insomniac, and I would see other people whose networks were not in a position to make them a safety net, and I would just fill their little funds. We were the lucky ones; Aaron had a job with decent insurance. Not everybody is that lucky.
Vogue: So, No Happy Endings, is that a reference to all of those tidy phrases, like, “If you’re not happy, it’s not the end?”
McInerny: Yes, all of that. We are in the midst of just a lot of bullshit on the Internet. . . God, I really just want to talk shit about a specific person, but that’s not classy so I’m not going to, but let’s say that there’s a very best-selling author. . . and all their work is basically, “Your happiness is on you, girl.” Like, not really. Fuck off. Truly, no. Learn how to sit with your discomfort and someone else’s discomfort without viewing it as a flaw. You are not obligated to create a silver lining. You are not obligated to make lemonade out of your lemons. Some hard things are just hard and that’s okay. You can wash your face as much as you want and it might not fucking help.
This interview has been edited and condensed.