Get to know our author of our book of the month for July, Hannah Richell. Before becoming a published writer, Hannah Richell worked in the book publishing and film industries in London and Sydney. She is the author of six international bestsellers, including Secrets of the Tides, The Search Party and One Dark Night. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. Hannah is a dual citizen of Great Britain and Australia and currently lives near Bath the southwest of England. An Ocean and a Day is her first work of non-fiction.
1. You have said this memoir was written over the course of a decade. How did the passage of time shape the story you ultimately told?
An Ocean and a Day opens in 2024, ten years after my husband’s death, then pivots back to the day of Matt’s fatal surfing accident. These two opening chapters set the structure of the memoir, a tidal motion that takes the reader forwards through the shadowlands of grief, but also retreats into a love story of a couple and a young family. The book includes the first two desolate years of raw grief, but then extends out over the years to offer insights into how my grief has shifted and changed, and ultimately, how it has changed me. The flowing backwards and forwards in time and memory reminds me of grief itself, how your mind occupies both the present and the past, trying to find a way to resolve the two. It allows the reader to piece together a ‘whole’ story by working through the fragments I share, and by juxtaposing the past with the present, I was able to include the light alongside the dark, until the book completes a full circle to meet me again on that beach in 2024. In this way, the end is the beginning, and the beginning becomes the end. I hope it is an honest and true account of one person reckoning with love and loss, and a book that might offer hope to others struggling to live with grief.
2. Did revisiting old memories bring any unexpected discoveries or insights?
I’ve found the memories of the life I lived with Matt that I most cherish now are not the big, showy celebrations or the milestones you tend to mark a life by. The ones I hold most dear are the small, everyday moments of family togetherness, spectacular for their sheer, mundane ordinariness. Paddling in breakers with rolled-up jeans. Tip-toeing into a bedroom to check on the kids at night, straightening blankets or rescuing a fallen toy from the floor. A cup of tea placed thoughtfully beside the bed. Bumping hips side-by-side as we brushed our teeth together. These are the moments I miss, and the moments that made us ‘us’. These are the moments that made a lifetime. Realising this has made me live now with a greater appreciation for the simpler moments in life, and for the days when life feels safe and steady.
3. What have your children taught you about resilience, healing, or joy?
Children are wonderful at being in the moment. It seems to be something that we find harder to do as we age and get caught up in the responsibilities of adulthood. My children, of course, carried weighty worries, fears and sadness after their Dad died, but I also noticed how they were able to slip into joy and silliness at moments of extreme emotion. I saw how mindful they could be, appreciating the simplest details in their days like a colourful bug, or a deep puddle to jump through, or a pile of blossom lying like confetti on a pavement. They showed me that there is a time for talking and analysing, and a time for just ‘being’ in our feelings. A time for long quiet hugs, and a time for putting on loud music and dancing it out in the kitchen. A time for spinning wildly on an expensive chair, and a time for staying in our pjs all day and eating cereal and ice cream for tea. Now they are older, I see the beautiful care and empathy they hold for friends and family when they go through tough times. Not a day goes by when I don’t wish my kids had their father back, but I am so proud of the people they are becoming and the way they have handled the challenges life has thrown at them.
4. You write about the healing power of creativity. What role did writing play in helping you navigate grief?
It feels as though I’ve always been writing. From the age of eight, I was filling diaries and using the written word to understand my life’s experiences and emotions, to capture them on the page and hold them within some sort of framework. But it was never more helpful than when I was plunged into sudden grief. In my darkest hours, I found writing to be an urgent release of pain. Like crying, it was a way to rid my body of what felt so overwhelming and all-consuming. Writing a memoir was the furthest thing from my mind. It was purely an act of survival. It was only later, when I revisited some of my words, that I began to see the transformation, and the hope emerging onto the page, and I wondered if shaping and sharing my words in a long form piece might offer someone else travelling their own grief journey a little comfort or connection, in the same way I had found reading other writers’ memoirs and essays on loss deeply helpful. Writing as therapy I suppose has been an instinctive urge throughout my life, but in grief it became a literal lifeline.
5. What do you wish people better understood about grief?
It’s common to talk of grief as having stages, a set timeline or an end point, but I have found grief to be unpredictable and unknowable. I don’t think it is something you can truly prepare for. I believe grief is as individual as the person and relationship you mourn, which in turn can make it feel like the loneliest place in the world. When my husband died, I felt as though I had been plunged into a deep sink hole. I felt the world clamouring for me to climb out and put aside my pain, to make everyone else feel more comfortable, though that felt utterly impossible. What helped me through those bewildering early months and years was connection. I sought out the people, places and activities that helped me tether myself back to life. Some of the anchors I clung to were reading, writing, therapy, my children, friends and family who could accompany me in my pain without attempt to ‘fix it’, getting outside as much as possible and walking in nature. Over time, I began to feel the weight of my grief shifting, and I grew stronger. You don’t get over it. You don’t move on. I still have days where grief steals the breath from my lungs, but you slowly find the strength to carry the loss forward. And no matter what the world says, there is no hurry. I found it easier, in the end, to let the heartbreak crack me open so that the grief could move through me. I held on to the idea that it hurt exactly as much as it was worth, and that I was honouring Matt in my mourning.
6. The book touches on how we discuss death in modern society. Do you think we’re getting better at having these conversations?
When Matt died, I saw very suddenly how we are all just one diagnosis, one accident, one wave away from the end, and I realised how naïve I had been. I had been living my life wearing blinkers. I could sense in some people’s reactions to what had happened to our family that I wasn’t alone in this. I felt the turning away, noticed the changing of the subject, or the crossing of streets as we approached. One friend told me, regretfully, that she simply didn’t “do death” and ghosted us. It confirmed to me that many of us live life hoping to avoid pain.
After Matt died, I wanted to shake the people I met and tell them that everyone they love is going to die, to remind them not to take a moment for granted.
In recent years, I have noticed an increasing number of writers, commentators, educators and scientists approaching the subject of death and grief more openly. Perhaps these conversations have been taking place since time immemorial and I was simply closed off to them, but my instinct tells me that a societal shift is taking place, and that conversations around death, dying and grief are starting to happen in a more open and inclusive way. I notice people around me are more willing to engage in ‘death talk’, which makes me glad. I believe it fundamentally benefits us all to share our deepest human experiences with each other, both our joy and our suffering. I believe what connects us is greater than what divides us and death, in my mind, is the ultimate common denominator. Death is not a gift, but it does act as a sharp reminder of what is: life.
An Ocean and a Day
An Ocean and a Day is a gift for those who have suffered the loss of someone so dearly loved. Much like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, it offers a glimmer of hope in a seemingly endless well of sorrow.' Books+Publishing
In 2014, author Hannah Richell was living a happy and fulfilled life in Sydney. Married, with two young children, she was in the middle of writing her new novel when the police knocked at her door to tell her that her husband, Matt, had been killed in a surfing accident at Tamarama beach. An Ocean and a Day is the riveting, intimate and poignant story of the journey she travelled over the first two years of loss, but it is also, more uniquely, an account of what happens beyond those early years, when time and distance offer perspective and hope.
Life-affirming and illuminating, An Ocean and a Day is a book about love and loss, marriage and mothering, healing and hope, and how we face the hardest days of our lives. It is a book that will make you draw your loved ones close, and maybe even leave you a little transformed.
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