Alexandra: White Hot Grief Parade is a memoir about the six months around the death of my father when I was eighteen years old. Beyond that plot point, I tell it in a very up-to-the-moment blogger voice. I break all the rules, I think, of writing memoir. There's a maze. There's a word search. There's things that are written as plays as well as more traditional prose. I think that's the parade. It's that when you're in the middle of a grief storm, it feels like one thing after another is hitting you. I wanted the style of the book and the format of the book to reflect that bombastic experience. It really focuses on my relationship to father, obviously, my relationship to my extended family. The real stars of the book are my remarkable eighteen-year-old friends and my mother. This point at the crossroads of childhood and adulthood, what does one do when they're hit with this thing that every culture fears the most? It doesn't even matter what animal you are, actually. Every time period, every era, every socioeconomic class, every language spoken fears losing someone they love. Yet it's this thing that we don't talk about very often. We don't talk about it very well when we do talk about it. On top of all of that, there aren't a lot of resources for people in between childhood and adulthood. I wanted to make a point that young adults are remarkable. The big question of the book, I hope -- I don't necessarily address it directly, but I hope it emerges. What does it mean to stand back up? We hear so many books about how bad things are, chapters and chapters and chapters of describing the bad. Then you get this fast-forward moment where it's like, ten years later, here I am and I'm fine. But what happens in that fast-forward? What is it like to stand up? This book, hopefully, is an homage to that because it's very universal.