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It was one of those moments when everything around her fell into place, Diana Bletter recalled. The year was 2005. She had just stepped out of a small burial house in Israel during a tahara, a Jewish burial ritual for the deceased, and her surroundings hit her.She was inspired.
“It was like one of those summer days when you walk out of the ocean and everything is just beautiful—the water, the sun, the sand,” she said during a recent telephone interview. “Having worked at The Southampton Press, I just thought, ‘Wow, this would be a great story.’ And I said, ‘I really have to write a novel about this.’”
And so she did. “A Remarkable Kindness,” her debut novel that William Morrow Paperbacks released on August 11, tells the story of four women who meet during a tahara and follows their friendship as it is strengthened by this unique, end-of-life tradition.
“It’s a surprisingly life-affirming ritual,” she said of the tahara. “What I mean by that is when I see the bookends of existence—when we see the end—it makes me very aware that we have one life that is given to us. We have to live it the best we can.”
In 1991, that meant following her gut—which, at that time, was moving her husband, Jonny, and their six children from Great Neck to Israel after a few of her relatives relocated years prior, including her parents, who were first-generation Americans.
“I grew up in the era of the Vietnam War generations, and I wanted to try to move back to Israel and work for peace,” Ms. Bletter said. “I still have culture shock to this day. Being an American, I am very hopeful and idealistic, and I still believe that if we sit down, we can work out our differences. But the Middle East doesn’t work like that.”
They returned to Long Island in 1999 for a one-year sabbatical. But their home in Westhampton resonated with them and they stayed until 2003 before moving back to Israel. During her time here, Ms. Bletter worked as a reporter for The Southampton Press and learned how to recognize a story.
At that specific tahara in 2005, her journalist instincts kicked in. She had the story. The characters and details came later.
Ms. Bletter has a daily routine that she maintains when writing anything—from short stories and articles to essays and novels. She openly rejects writer’s block, comparing writing to owning a store.
“You have to go to your store every day, and even if you don’t get customers, you have to open the store,” she explained. “You can have really bad days and throw out 100 pages just to get 10 pages.”
The four women who fill the 416 pages that Ms. Bletter kept are completely fictional, though each of them has qualities Ms. Bletter said she admires.
“I feel like even though they are fictional, they’ve inspired me, which is a funny thing that happens,” she said. “They’ve given me a sense of courage and inspiration that helped me appreciate my friends even more.”
For more information about Diana Bletter and “A Remarkable Kindness,” visit thebestchapter.com.
on Aug 25, 2015