CR 011: Mary Jones on the Many Ways We Say Goodbye

The acclaimed author discusses her debut collection of short stories, “The Goodbye Process.”

Mary Jones, photo by Summer Barnhart

---

This is a benefit for paid subscribers. If you’re interested in reading this and hundreds of others in the archive, please upgrade to a paid subscription. It gives you access to inspiring interviews, and helps me keep the lights on. Win-win!

---

Mary Jones’s writing has been published in numerous literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Santa Monica Review, Brevity, and many others. Her essay “The Suicide Disease” was cited as notable in The Best American Essays, and her short story “When You Get There” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Now, 28 of her stories are available in The Goodbye Process, a beautifully written collection of fiction centered around the ways we say goodbye—goodbye to friends, to a simpler childhood, to a dying parent, to a dying spouse, to a phase in life, to secrets, to youth, to young love, to one’s own life. It is at times humorous, at times devastating, but stunning and wholly original throughout. (Library Journal gave it a starred review, calling it a “must-have” collection.”)

Jones shares that although she did not plan to write a collection of stories on goodbyes, she did leave the project with a new appreciation for letting go. “It’s a collection about loss,” she says, “but the flip side of that is it’s a collection about resilience, because it’s people getting through things and surviving things. I came away with a more optimistic view about resilience. One of the things I [realized] after writing this book is, wow, we really do go through a lot. [Laughs] And we somehow keep going, even though sometimes it’s things we never imagined we could get through. Also, we’re not alone—everybody’s going through these things. I find that comforting.”

Jones chatted with me over Zoom about her love for detail, her writing process, and how she handles writer’s block.

---

This content contains affiliate links. I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

---

SANDRA EBEJER: Where did the idea for this collection of short stories come from?

MARY JONES: Well, I didn’t set out to write a book about loss. I wrote about half of the stories when I realized that they all shared this theme, and I knew it was something I wanted to explore more deeply. I think a lot of times when people think about loss, what comes to mind is the death of a loved one, but there are so many other kinds of loss that we experience as we go through life. This book is an exploration of all those other things—loss of relationships, loss of youth, loss of health. I think sometimes people don’t feel entitled to grieve those things, but anytime we lose something that’s significant to us, we experience grief. So the book is an exploration of all those different things that come up.

Some of these stories have been published elsewhere in the past. Did they change significantly from the original version to what ended up in the book?

For the most part, not really. Some of them did change somewhat; some of them not at all. I don’t think there were any drastic revisions. It was just tweaking a beginning or tweaking an ending. The bigger edits with the book came with deciding which stories would be included, which stories would go, and story order.

There are a few characters who appear in more than one story. Was that intentional, or were there certain characters that you found difficult to let go of?