I could have sworn I saw my dead wife reading from a podium last Thursday at 7 p.m. in the 24-hour room in Sawyer Library, her face like a ghost, illuminated by the lectern light. My eyes had mistaken me — it was fiction author Laura van den Berg reading from her most recent short story collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, published in 2020. Van den Berg read her story “Your Second Wife,” which follows a woman who impersonates the dead wives of widowed husbands — a position she calls a “grief freelancer,” which is just one of the character’s many gigs.
Van den Berg has published dozens of short stories and is best known for three acclaimed collections: What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us published in 2009, The Isle of Youth published in 2013, and the collection she read from at the College. Following the publication of her most recent collection, she received the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Despite her success as a writer, van den Berg was not drawn to literature at a young age. “I did not write as a child, and I also wasn’t a really big reader as a child,” she said in an interview with the Record. “I struggled in school, and I did not imagine myself as having a literary future.”
It wasn’t until she took a creative writing workshop as an undergraduate at Rollins College in Florida that she developed a taste for contemporary short fiction. There, she read the short story, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” by Amy Hempel, which she credits with inspiring her love for literature. “I think it was the first time that I encountered a world that had characters, ideas, and emotions that I could really relate to and connect with,” she said. “What happened for me in that moment was not so much that I became a writer overnight, but I became a reader.”
After earning her bachelor’s degree in English, van den Berg completed a Masters in Fine Art in creative writing at Emerson College and began publishing collections of short stories. Now, in addition to her writing, she is a senior lecturer and director of creative writing at Harvard College.
Before writing “Your Second Wife,” van den Berg was hooked on the idea of a gig worker who impersonates dead people, which became the inspiration for her narrator. “From that idea, the character emerged,” she told the Record. “I started asking questions like, what kind of person would be good at this job? What kind of person would want to do this job?”
Assistant Professor of English Paul Yoon, who is married for van der Berg, praised the complexity of her characters. “Her characters are fighters,” he said in his introduction for van den Berg on Thursday. “They’re wounded, lost, angry, loyal, and they fight to survive and to love and to navigate all the mysteries that defend their worlds and lives. They enter portals into worlds possibly worse than our own, and they face the worst of themselves, and they never give up.”
Van den Berg, who has also published several novels, found that her most bizarre ideas fit best in the short-story format. “One really wonderful thing about writing short stories is that you do not have the burden of sustainability,” she told the Record. “You can explore a voice, a world, a situation that can really be super dynamic for 15 pages or 20 pages, but might not be able to sustain several 100 pages.”
Though she wrote the story in 2020, van den Berg noted that it has since taken on a new timeliness. The piece’s premise echoes the rise in popularity of griefbots, artificial intelligence programs designed to emulate a deceased loved one, she said. “I am really interested and deeply disturbed by a lot of the developments with AI and the rapidity and the lack of regulation,” she told the Record. “There’s this idea of AI stepping into intimate roles… I know that that’s stuff that I’m going to want to continue to write about.”
To van den Berg, impersonating a dead wife acts as a sort of time travel, drawing the past into the present. Her interest in time permeates her body of work, van den Berg explained. “I think time and being in consciousness are very mysterious,” she told the Record. “We don’t only live in linear time. Think about dreams that seem to predict the future and premonitions and déjà vu. All these very non-linear, mysterious ways that we experience time.”
To Senior Lecturer in English Karen Shepard ’87, van den Berg’s balance of humor and darkness captures the ambiguity of the human experience. “In a literary world that often finds it easier (and perhaps more commercially viable) to be one thing or another, easily categorizable, I welcomed hearing from an author whose work is always insisting that multiple things are true at once, and that’s both the joy and the burden of being a human on this earth,” she wrote in an email to the Record.
Van den Berg’s own writing philosophy embraces Shepard’s interpretation of her work. “I think fiction is really about embodying experiences and about sort of embodying and holding questions, and less about finding answers,” she told the Record.
