I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truthtelling

Drawing upon her previous work and over two decades of teaching, New York Times bestselling memoirist Emily Rapp Black explores how art can move us through moments of grief and loss while celebrating the spirit-lifting potential of all creative acts

To be disabled is to be exiled; to have a terminal illness is to be isolated in one's time-limitedness; to grieve is to be annihilated; and to live is inevitable: all of these, together and at once, form the core of the truth of being human.

As most artists know, approaching their "hard" stories in a way that feels joyful, redemptive, and meaningful can be difficult to near impossible. With I Would Die If I Were You, celebrated author Emily Rapp Black has designed a guide that will help creative people working in any medium make meaning out of loss.

For her entire life, she has been answering awkward questions in elevators: "What's wrong with you?" "What happened to your body?" And, in the case of her son's terminal illness and death, she's been told more times than she can count: "I would die if I were you." Rejecting such cruel and casual conclusions, Rapp Black posits that part of the human project is to experience grief and loss, and nobody gets out alive, and no writer--or person--survives anything alone. We need empathy, and for that we need community, and we need all the stories told within them to reach our fullest potential. I Would Die If I Were You is a bold and bracing blueprint--part memoir, part craft book--for how art making can lead us to our fullest truths.

EMILY RAPP BLACK is the author of the New York Times bestseller book Poster Child, The Still Point of the Turning World, Sanctuary, and Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg. A former Fulbright scholar, Guggenheim Fellow, and graduate of Harvard Divinity School, she is Professor of Creative Writing at University of California-Riverside, where she also teaches in the School of Medicine.