All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
There is a lot of nonfiction out there about grief, from the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross classic On Grief and Grieving to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (and Blue Nights, for that matter). But it can be a tricky thing, trying to transform the essentially human yet distinctly intimate experience of loss into fodder for a novel.
That’s exactly what television writer Aisha Muharrar has done with her new book Loved One, however. Although the story that she tells about Julia—an LA-based jewelry designer who, reeling from the death of her close friend (and longtime situationship) Gabe, builds an unlikely relationship with Gabe’s most recent ex, Elizabeth—is a painful one, the comedic voice that Muharrar has honed on shows including Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, and Hacks makes it a genuine pleasure to read.
This week, Vogue spoke to Muharrar about being excited for “the people part” of promoting Loved One, building a postmortem love triangle, diving deep into jewelry-design research, and how she balances fiction with screenwriting.
Vogue: How does it feel seeing Loved One out in the world?
Aisha Muharrar: It’s such a mix of feelings. It’s such a solitary experience, writing a novel, and one thing that has just been really great is seeing the community around me support me. I’ve had friends volunteer to co-host events; my friend has a bar and we worked together with this fundraising organization called the Freya Project. There’s this wine bar in Kingston, New York, that I really love that’s one of the places I kind of based Elizabeth’s restaurant in the book on, and I was talking about it to a waitress there, and then she told me that her husband works at the bookstore in town, so now we’re doing an event with that bookstore and the bar.
That’s what I’m most excited about, actually—seeing people. One of my best friends is making the drive to Kingston, and then we’re going to hang out. People who were following my work on Parks and Recreation or when I was on the Gilmore Guys podcast are coming in to support, and that’s the part I really like. I like all of the parts of writing, I guess, but I really enjoy the part of the process where there’s that exchange: I put something out there, someone else consumes it, has their own interpretation, and tells me about what they think. I’m excited for that. I have a lot of great conversation partners too, so I’m just excited for the people part.
How did the seed of Julia, Gabe, and Elizabeth’s story come to you?
I was in New York, in a cab with my friend leaving a party, and during the cab ride, she told me that a friend of hers was dating my ex-boyfriend. That ex of mine really was a good boyfriend—we had a fine, amicable little breakup—and she said that she’d recommended him based on my experience. But now her friend was not having a good time—like, he wasn’t being a good boyfriend to her. I was like, “I’m not Yelp for boyfriends!” But that made me think: that was my experience with him, but it’s been a few years. Maybe he’s changed. Maybe the dynamic of that relationship is contributing. It was just interesting to me to think, Oh, we dated the same person, but if we were in a room together, would our experiences overlap?
That was years before I started the book, but it was in the back of my mind, and then when Parks ended, I had always wanted to write prose fiction—that’s what I’d gone to college with the intention of doing. I ended up with this great job [writing for television], but I’d been wanting to write a book since I was a kid. I wrote a nonfiction book in high school, but I really wanted to write a novel. It kind of felt like, why not do it now? It was just after we’d wrapped this show I really cared about, I didn’t have kids or anything, I had just gotten married, and I thought: Well, now is the time to do it. That’s when the cab conversation came back into my mind.
I’d already been thinking about loss, just because of my personal experiences with loss, and I talked to a friend who lost her grandfather, and she was aware that I had a few people close to me pass away. She said that I was the “expert in grief,” which wasn’t, like, a great moniker, but I thought, Okay, well, maybe there is something to explore here. 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.
I think those two different ideas were kind of swirling around my head, and eventually they came together into the characters of Julia and Gabe. I had Julia and Gabe first, and then once I had Elizabeth, it really took shape and made it not such a straightforward love story. I like writing about a slightly more complicated version of something we’ve maybe seen before, and I wanted to explore a love triangle with two women, because I feel like that’s not been explored as much.
I loved the descriptions of Julia’s jewelry; how did you decide to make her a jewelry designer?
I did a lot of research into jewelry design, actually—I talked to a few jewelry designers, and I just researched a lot of different brands and “how to make jewelry” books. I think it came from knowing that Julia was this artistic, creative person, but she was never going to follow a path like Gabe’s, where she would make an artistic passion her sole pursuit in the way that he was so focused on music. I think her financial background would make it so that she would have to find something that felt financially credible, and she also has this pragmatic approach from her parents. I also wanted Julia to be on a journey where she would try to be “practical” and go to law school, but she wouldn’t be able to fully do that.
A lot of the jewelry designers talk about creating mini-sculptures; they have artistic backgrounds in other fields, like painting or sculpture, or even just an interest in art history. I thought that for Julia, it made sense that she would have this interest in art and art history, but there would also be something very practical about what she was doing. She’s actually welding things, and she’s a metalsmith. I liked the idea that she was in a profession that seemed very romantic, but the reality of it was spending a lot of time in a studio perfecting something, getting your hands dirty, sometimes burning yourself, sometimes cutting yourself—a really physical job. She’s also running a small business, which is a different skill set too, and that part, I think, satisfies the more practical work that her parents would have wanted her to go into. She’s got that artistic passion, but she also has to track people down for invoices, and she’s near the glamour of the people she’s styling, but she’s not quite in that world herself.
How did you balance writing this book with your work in TV?
I’m still learning! There was a time where my hours were 10:00 to 5:00, then 6:00 to 1:00 a.m. I was working on Season 1 of The Good Place, which was after Parks, and that’s when I started getting really serious about working on the book. I wasn’t there for Seasons 2 and 3, and then I came back for Season 4, and then I joined Hacks. It’s just been a balance of dipping in and out. Luckily, television also has these long breaks. I think I originally planned for it to be this kind of idyllic thing where I’d work in TV, and then I’d take these long breaks and maybe go to a chateau somewhere for a writer’s colony and write. It was not that; it was just me, writing in the middle of the night.
By the time I was on Hacks, I already had my agent and we were working on polishing, getting a publisher, and then those editorial notes, so the book was pretty much as it would be. There was still a lot of going over sentences or figuring out publishing things or editing and adding, but I just kind of made it work by necessity.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
