Writing can release grief the writer did not know existed.

Evidence

The first time I realised what I was writing really was something, not just me wanting to be someone, or pretending to be, was when I wrote a passage about dad and started crying while I was writing. I had never done that before, never even been close. I wrote about dad and the tears were streaming down my cheeks, I could barely see the keyboard or the screen, I just hammered away. Of the existence of the grief inside me that had been released at that moment I had known nothing; I had not had an inkling. My father was an idiot, I wanted nothing to do with him, and it cost me nothing to keep well away from him. It wasn’t a question of keeping away from something, it was a question of the something not existing; nothing about him touched me. That was how it had been, but then I had sat down to write, and the tears poured forth. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 2513

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the writerly idea in Mantel’s ‘A Memoir of My Former Self’ about shocking the psyche to generate charged prose. — connects to: Restrained literary form can carry testimony when survivors will not speak of an event — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 113; Grief recovery paradoxically makes the lost person more vivid — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 313; Unacknowledged losses can linger until named and forgiven. — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 940 (+3 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: the craft of writing toward what you don’t yet know you feel, and how tears function as a diagnostic of genuine material.

Related

• Unacknowledged losses can linger until named and forgiven. (similarity 0.81)
• Restrained literary form can carry testimony when survivors will not speak of an event (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Unacknowledged losses can linger until named and forgiven. #corroborates (0.70) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 940
• Restrained literary form can carry testimony when survivors will not speak of an event #expands (0.60) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 113
• Silent tragedies can be experienced yet remain unseen by others. #expands (0.55) — Crews, Harry, A childhood the biography of a place, 387
• Grief recovery paradoxically makes the lost person more vivid #qualifies (0.50) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 313