We're All Coming Home in the Dark

Navigating the line between writing dark stories and everyone's desire for a happy ending.

Photo by Ryanwar Hanif on Unsplash

Life would be easier, I think, if I wrote happy stories. If I were anesthetized. If I brushed up that resume and preened through the interviews and said, yes, oh, yes, my only goal in life is to devise strategies to trick people into buying garbage they don’t need while our planet slowly cinders. Like water coming to a boil. Life would be easier if I took a higher dose of anti-depressants. If I left my moral compass at the door and penned tutorials about how you too can make a million dollars a month selling assembly-line prose — all while dressed in your Willy Loman wares. Life would be easier, I think, if I opened the blinds, the windows, the screens, and let it all the light until I’m burned by it.

All the things that used to be inside of me…now they’re outside. But the inside of me is empty, a character laments in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterpiece Cure. I think of those lines often. Over the years I’ve tried to crack the words open and sift through its parts only to find a clean nothingness. Maybe I should’ve appreciated the art for what it was instead of trying to give it layers and layers of meaning.

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Before anti-depressants, I couldn’t see a bottom. My job as a writer was to burrow deep — rocks in my hair, silt in my teeth — until I found one. When editors and readers set my work aside because they found it relentlessly dark, I shook my head. I couldn’t see it. Oh, it could be so much worse, I laughed. Before anti-depressants, I made myself at home in the dark. I cocooned myself in my apartment with my horror movies until a neighbor knocked on my door. Concerned with all the women screaming. Is everything okay?

Why is that we wait for the screaming? Where were we when the water was coming to a boil?

A month after I started anti-depressants, I re-read my two books and all of my stories and said, oh, dear god, there is a bottom. And there I was, burying myself in it. There was my pain and anger, spread out over a lifetime of type. And it was terrifying.

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I’m 25, sitting in a classroom on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A short story, which will become a novel I’ll never publish, The Business of Leaving, is getting eviscerated by a roomful of people I don’t particularly like. They’re “line” writers. Plots and emotion bore them. The architecture of a sentence is paramount. They’re busy transforming nouns into verbs and whatnot. To them, I am simple. My work elicits eye-rolls and emphatic sighs. Why is it that everyone in your stories dies? It’s so depressing.

Why does everyone die? Because eventually everyone does, I snap when I’m finally able to speak.

It would take me nearly half a lifetime to realize the darkness wasn’t the issue. The dying in and of itself wasn’t the issue. What I’d failed to see is that between our first cries out in the world and our quiet slip into forever slumber, there exists infinite possibility. The issue was that everyone dying in my stories eliminated this exploration, and that’s what we as humans are tethered to — the love of the journey and the hope it brings.

Your work can be dark, the world taught me, as long as there’s a journey and some semblance of hope. The journey part I get. But what if hope doesn’t exist in the story itself and is left up to the reader’s imagination? What about the possibility of the characters beyond the page? Because a story — albeit fiction or narrative non-fiction — is about a set of characters at a particular point in time. What we get as readers is the vacuum — nothing before or beyond it. And if art is meant to reflect reality then there exists the possibility of a scenario where hope ceases to exist. Maybe there is only the events that unfold and how the characters experience them.

The problem isn’t this possibility in and of itself, it’s that most people don’t want to read it. They don’t want present-tense sadness. They want their endings like their gin — neat. They want redemption. They want closure and their characters made whole. They want a reality which doesn’t always exist.

Perhaps because the reality in which we all live is too much to bear.

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Everyone has their line. How much they can tolerate, what they can take. My line spreads across oceans. And yet, I encountered two pieces of art this year that made me think: this is a lot. Sarah Manguso’s novel, Very Cold People and the New Zealand film, Coming Home in the Dark, based on a short story by Owen Marshall. Both are exquisite, masterfully executed, but I, as a writer of mostly dark narrative non-fiction, had to ask myself, why couldn’t I bear this? Should this possibility not exist because I can’t bear it?

Today, the day before my birthday, I watched this movie again in the pre-dawn hour. Stylistically, it has all the elements I love in a piece of writing: atmosphere that is itself a character, tight, effective dialogue, characters worth burrowing into, and I realized I didn’t love this as much as I wanted because I didn’t like how the film made me feel. A woman comfortable in discomfort was left uncomfortable.

Maybe it was the opening shot of a car abandoned in the wind. Or the children who get shot for no reason and dragged into the water. Or the specter of abuse that is alluded to but never entirely defined. Or that fact that while Mandrake, while stylish burgeoning on polite, is cruel and unforgiving to the very end. We understand why he is the way he is but we still hate him for it.

For the first time, I wanted what I imagine what most people want from my work — an erasure of bleakness. A thimble of light in the dark. Because my life would be easier if I wrote smart, happy, accessible stories.

And then it occurred to me that I was lazy in watching this film because through what appears to be rampant nihilism, light exists — you as the viewer are left to surmise it. I made the choice to stay with this film to the end because while it triggered much in me, it also intrigued me as good art does. And if I make the choice to engage with the art, I have to be prepared to do some work. Because the relationship between author and reader is such that once the author sets the work out into the world it’s up to the individual reader to ferret out its meaning.

The reader doesn’t have to agree or see what the writer intended in creating the work because the reader will come with their own background and baggage. And they’ll set those bags down on the work as they so often do.

The light in Coming Home in the Dark is the other villain that makes somewhat merciful choices in the end while acknowledging his abuse. Pathos rises up all around us in the film’s end, which allows for the possibility of a journey beyond the frame. The light is the mother who jumped in the river who may have survived. The light is the victim — the father, husband, and target of two men’s ire, the protagonist who turns out to be the antagonist — and the possibility that he is changed.

We can shine our own light to the work or the work can simply be what is presented: everyone suffers in the end. But regardless of what we choose even the bleakest stories have the right to exist because they are one of a story’s many paths and possibilities. Because they are a version of an author’s truth. Because cruel, unimaginable things happen all the time for no reason. Because while we may want to shield our eyes from the dark and not see things we can’t unsee, the darkest parts of human nature will always exist.

It’s up to us as artists to be strong enough to realize that while our work may not be for everyone, it’s always enough for someone.