{"id":66799,"date":"2026-05-21T08:53:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T12:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=66799"},"modified":"2026-05-21T08:53:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T12:53:11","slug":"mary-berman-five-things-i-learned-writing-until-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2026\/05\/21\/mary-berman-five-things-i-learned-writing-until-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Mary Berman: Five Things I Learned Writing Until Death"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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If Ophelia Cohen learned one thing from her parents, it\u2019s that getting married is a bad idea. But if she\u2019s learning anything from her widowed mother\u2019s dementia, it\u2019s that dying alone is worse. So when she meets Luke \u2014 the man of her mother\u2019s dreams \u2014 marriage suddenly doesn\u2019t seem so crazy.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But none of Ophelia\u2019s obsessive scrolling on wedding forums can prepare her for the nightmare of planning her own. Why is her mother-in-law going crazy over every detail? Why is Luke\u2019s family so eager to host the wedding in their vineyard\u2019s ancient chapel? And what exactly will Ophelia have to sacrifice if she and her mother both hope to survive her special day?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shot through with wicked humor, pitch-black horror, and unexpected romance, Until Death is a deliciously dark and funny send-up of the wedding industrial complex\u2014and a mother-daughter story unlike any you\u2019ve read before.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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1. When it comes to wedding planning, your spreadsheets will not save you.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fun fact: I had not yet planned a wedding when I wrote this book. I wasn\u2019t even engaged. So, for research, I relied heavily on that bastion of first-person accounts, Wedding Reddit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before Wedding Reddit, I would have assumed that the worst parts of wedding planning were the organization and the expense. Most people are not simply born with high-level, large-scale event-planning skills, which is, you know, a whole career that requires experience and training. Still, I would have guessed that with budgeting and organization \u2014 a spreadsheet, maybe a three-ring binder or two \u2014 you could circumvent that problem and come out relatively unscathed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nay, nay. As I discovered through hundreds of firsthand accounts \u2014 and as my protagonist, Ophelia, discovers, through myriad run-ins with her terrible in-laws \u2014 the horrific parts of wedding planning aren\u2019t the parts that can be solved with a spreadsheet. Hell Is Other People.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. The symptoms of dementia stretch far beyond memory loss.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My protagonist\u2019s mother has dementia, and my protagonist becomes her full-time caretaker. (This is still a fun book, I promise!) My own mother does not<\/em> have dementia \u2014 we joke that she\u2019s not going to get it, because she\u2019s<\/em> going to have to remember everything \u2014 but when I was a teenager, I witnessed close-up what it meant for her to care for her own mother through the illness. For a long time, I didn\u2019t even realize it was<\/em> an illness. I thought that dementia and aging were synonymous. I didn\u2019t realize there was a way to get old without losing your body and your mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because I was so young, and because I didn\u2019t really know what I was looking at, and because I didn\u2019t provide the bulk of my grandmother\u2019s care, I thought the dementia was the same as the forgetting. I didn\u2019t recognize all the other symptoms: wandering (oh, so that\u2019s why Nanny tried to walk to her sister-in-law\u2019s house at two o\u2019clock in the morning!), aggression (there is an excellent memoir, Slow Dancing with a Stranger<\/em> by Meryl Comer, that talks about this), agitation, sundowning, mood shifts. It\u2019s all really quite devastating. Considering how many of us, God willing, grow old and need to either provide or accept some type of dementia care, I\u2019m shocked that as a society, we don\u2019t have better care systems in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Pennsylvania has some great wine country!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I already knew, to a limited extent, of the existence of Pennsylvania\u2019s wine country. This is thanks not to my book, but to the spotted lanternfly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spotted lanternfly is an insect indigenous to China and Vietnam. I assume it\u2019s harmless over there, but here, it\u2019s very invasive. If you live on what I think of as the \u201cAmtrak Northeast Corridor\u201d section of the continental United States, you will know all about the pernicious threat of the spotted lanternfly. And, a few years ago, when we finally managed, for once in our sorry lives, to march in lockstep as a society to stamp those buggers out, part of the messaging was that we had to kill the spotted lanternflies because otherwise they would threaten Pennsylvania wine country… which implied the existence of Pennsylvania wine country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I knew we had it, technically. But I didn\u2019t know it was so nice! I spent a long time researching Lancaster wineries for this book, and by my count, there are at least seven wineries within or around Lancaster County, an area otherwise mostly famed for its Amish quilts and Dutch Wonderland. Not to advertise, but they also have some cute hotels<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. There are a lot<\/em> of patron saints for women in terrible relationships.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This book is very Catholic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I grew up Catholic myself, and I knew that if I was going to do a good job on a book about a wedding, the wedding in question would be a Catholic one. So the vineyard at which the wedding takes place has its own haunted Catholic chapel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Originally, I also had a whole bit where the Stations of the Cross (IYKYK) had been replaced by hand-carved panels of a series of female saints. Those panels are no longer in the book. But I learned about the saints nonetheless. Saint Godelieve, patron saint of those with abusive in-laws! Saint Helena, patron saint of abandoned wives! Saint Wilgefortis, patron saint of women who wish to be liberated from their terrible husbands! All of them died in progressively more excruciating ways, but they live in on Catholic art, and in the third draft of my novel, which will not see the light of day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Your family will still love you.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a novel about a woman with some similar biographical details to mine, who is having a very, very<\/em> difficult time with her mother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be clear, my real-life mother is lovely and supportive. At the time of this writing, she has made plans to drive all up and down the Eastern Seaboard to kvell over me while I talk to crowds about the terrible mother in my book. But three years ago, when I sat down to write this novel, I really thought she would read it and stop speaking to me. In the middle of drafting the first chapter, I fumbled around for a realistic detail, and I landed on my real-life mother\u2019s real-life injured knee. And a sort of gentle background dread rose up within me. I thought, Oh, shit. This is going to be the one that makes it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That dread expanded and solidified as I injected more details into this frankly bombastic book about an evil vineyard and a shitty fianc\u00e9. My mother\u2019s jewelry. My father\u2019s secular Jewish heritage. My partner\u2019s haircut. My mother\u2019s nickname for me. My father\u2019s wire-rimmed glasses. My partner\u2019s very specific career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, I don\u2019t know of a better way to make the made-up stuff feel real than to hang it on real details. I think of myself kind of like a magician sawing a woman in half: the woman is real, the box is real, but obviously no one\u2019s been cut in half.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I could see how somebody could be confused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I was terrified that my mother \u2014 or, if not her, then somebody; my father, my partner, some random cousin, somebody \u2014 would read this book and think I had slandered my whole family in a public forum. That by writing and publishing this novel, I would destroy the relationships that meant the most to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously that has not happened. I made that fear up. And what\u2019s more, I\u2019ve expressed this fear to other writers; and it turns out to be a very common fear, and almost \u2014 not quite all, but almost<\/em> \u2014 all of us just made it up. It wasn\u2019t true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The people who love us love us. Love is not conditional. And actually, now that I\u2019m looking back \u2014 I think that\u2019s a lesson Ophelia learns, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mary Berman is a Philadelphia-based writer. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Mississippi, and she also holds a BA in writing seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Her short works have been published in Cicada<\/em>, PseudoPod<\/em>, Fireside<\/em>, and elsewhere. Until Death<\/em> is her debut novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mary Berman<\/strong>: Website<\/a> | Newsletter<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until Death<\/strong>: Bookshop.org<\/a> | Amazon<\/a> | B&N<\/a> | Kobo<\/a> | Mary\u2019s local indie bookstore<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Ophelia Cohen learned one thing from her parents, it\u2019s that getting married is a bad idea. But if she\u2019s learning anything from her widowed mother\u2019s dementia, it\u2019s that dying alone is worse. So when she meets Luke \u2014 the man of her mother\u2019s dreams \u2014 marriage suddenly doesn\u2019t seem so crazy. But none of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-66799","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-hnp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66799"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66801,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66799\/revisions\/66801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}