While grief is a subject that’s been explored by writers and artists throughout time, the experience has rarely been translated to compulsively readable fiction. Aisha Muharrar’s debut novel, Loved One, is the rare grief novel that maintains a sense of humor and wit throughout its telling. It’s crucial to note that Muharrar has spent her career thus far as a television writer, writing for comedies like Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, and Hacks—and she brings this sharp eye for fun to this story of a woman grieving the surprise death of her 29 year old friend.
The novel is structured a very unique pseudo-love triangle: our narrator Julia is a successful jewelry designer living in Los Angeles, when her good friend Gabe, a popular indie musician, dies shockingly in a household accident. Julia and Gabe first met in their college years and dated briefly, a short but impactful romance that haunted Julia until she ran into Gabe many years later, when the two picked back up as dear friends without a romantic element to their relationship. But things became more complicated, and we learn that Julia and Gabe had slept together just a month before Gabe’s death, leaving Julia with a slew of unanswered questions.
For readers who recognize this popular friends-to-lovers rom-com conceit, Julia is quick to clarify, “An immediate and important caveat: Gabe and I were actual friends. I won’t mention this again, because then the lady doth protest too much, but the point has to be made. We weren’t the kind of friends who were never really friends. The kind of friends you see in a romantic comedy where there are two incredibly attractive people who are deeply emotionally invested in each other, and we’re supposed to believe they have never once considered the idea of sexual intercourse.” And while there clearly was a bit of a romantic spark, the dynamics are further complicated by Elizabeth, a self-possessed British restauranteur whom Gabe was dating up until a month or so before his death—whose also been left with a great deal of unanswered questions about the nature of her relationship with Gabe.
Following Gabe’s funeral, Julia decides to travel to London in an attempt to rescue Gabe’s possessions from Elizabeth’s apartment where the two had been living prior to his death. Julia and Elizabeth have a somewhat icy dynamic, both suspicious of the others intentions and character, complicating Julia’s quest. She at first approaches Elizabeth feigning a chance run-in at a gallery, but then the two form an unlikely bond in which they begin to unravel the fictions about each other that they were living with, and put together the pieces of Gabe’s lives and their roles in it. They begin by hiding various details from each other, but as their trust builds they’re drawn closer by honesty and candor in regards to the less than perfect nature of the man that brought them together, and Gabe’s importance begins to fade as the relationship between Julia and Elizabeth deepens.
The novel is so successful in winning you over with these complex and interesting characters, that its easy to forget that it’s about death or grief at all. In an interview with Vogue, Muharrar explains, “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”. Muharrar perfectly balances the pathos of these characters coming to terms with loss while still detailing the humor that comes with everyday situations, even ones rooted in profound sadness. A beautiful debut that feels like a breath of fresh air in this fiction landscape.