My Stepfather Died by Suicide a Week Before My First Book Came Out. The Connections Were Eerie (Exclusive Essay)

“I was being drawn back to that same town, to those same woods that inspired the book, to confront a real-life horror,” writes ‘Night Songs’ author Alli Dyer

A week before my first novel Strange Folk was released in August 2024, my stepfather walked into the woods surrounding my parents’ home in rural Virginia and shot himself.

I took the redeye out from Los Angeles, riding waves of disbelief, wrenching realization and numbness. But beneath the surface, an eerie awareness buzzed. My novel Strange Folk follows a family of small-town Appalachian witches suspected of murder after a body turns up in their woods. And now I was being drawn back to that same town, to those same woods that inspired the book, to confront a real-life horror.  

In the weeks that followed, when strangers and acquaintances asked me about having Strange Folk published, I didn’t know what to say. His death and the book release were now forever linked, in more and weirder ways than just the timing, but I couldn’t be honest with them. 

Saying the words themselves felt like an act of violence. Even now, I feel guilty putting them in the first line of this essay. 

But at the same time, it’s freeing to finally say them out loud.

My stepfather, Doug, raised me from the age of six. He was silly and charming and unpretentious, and we had an organic chemistry. When asked to write about my favorite person in second grade, I chose Doug. I loved him like a father. 

He was also the last person I ever expected to die by suicide.

He was a mountain man, as my family liked to say, but not a caricature of one. A real one. He could lift an entire boat out of the river, and he could work a chainsaw. He was a fanatical hunter and fly fisherman, even tying his own exquisite flies. 

He was also the steady one in the family. When the brakes went on the car, he got them fixed. If a tree threatened the house, he cut it down. He worked for the same engineering firm for almost 30 years. He went to church every Sunday. He saved up for retirement so that he could spend his later years flyfishing the great trout streams. 

This steadiness also came with a rigidity — he didn’t understand people who were different from him, or things he’d never experienced, like my brother’s queerness, or the mental illnesses that my siblings and I have struggled with since childhood. Sometimes he tried, and I know he loved us, though I’m not excusing how he hurt us over the years — that is real, and it is important to acknowledge, especially now that he’s gone. 

But at least he was steady.

So in March of 2024, when my mother told me he was struggling at work, I didn’t think much of it. An expensive error had been made, something he had never experienced before as a brilliant, fastidious engineer. But these things happened, right? People made mistakes.

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And yet, this error was like a piece of sand in the perfectly calibrated machine of his mind. He couldn’t understand how something like this could have happened and now, he saw potential errors, potential dangers, everywhere. The world was no longer a safe, reliable place.  

Even after he stopped sleeping and could no longer take pleasure in church or fishing, I thought he was merely experiencing anxiety for the first time and couldn’t cope. His doctor believed this as well, and so they put him on various medications that didn’t help. I thought he just needed to adapt and find the right medication, and he would be fine. 

About two months before he died, he and my mother came to California to see me, and I told him as much. It would get better, I promised. I didn’t ask him how he was feeling, or if he was okay, or if I could help in some way. I had already decided what was happening to him: He was only having a hard time because he thought this couldn’t happen to someone like him, that anxiety or mental illness wasn’t real.

Despite being a writer and, as such, habitually curious about other people and their internal landscapes, I was categorically incurious about him in this instant, just as he’d been incurious about people who were different from him.   

He and my mom were supposed to travel through California with me and my husband for over a week, but two days in, he was so miserable that he flew home alone. I remember watching him from the window of the bed and breakfast as he paced the garden outside, as if he was looking for some escape that didn’t exist, some way out of his own skin. 

Before he left, he apologized for not being more empathetic to my struggles with anxiety, or to my siblings’ mental health challenges. But I found no vindication in his apology. It was destabilizing to see him so undone. I wanted him to hurry up and get better so he could stop making my mom’s life so hard. So we could get back to normal. 

I had no idea it was the last time I would ever see him. I never thought he was in any danger of hurting himself. It was so far beyond my understanding of him as a person, even after seeing him in such distress, that I never even considered it. 

So when he took his own life at the end of July, it wasn’t just a tragedy. It was a betrayal, and a mystery. 

How could he have done such a thing? He, of all people?

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When our family talked about it afterward, we said it wasn’t him. He wasn’t himself those last few months. It was someone else who pulled the trigger. But was this just another refusal to recognize that he, too, could be profoundly vulnerable? 

My mother has retraced his steps since his death and feels confident he was suffering from undiagnosed prefrontal dementia, where the frontal and temporal lobes shrink, causing changes in personality and behavior. But we’ll never really know. He didn’t leave a note of any kind. Only his wallet placed on top of the gun safe where he kept his grandfather’s pistol.

Strange Folk wasn’t the only book in my head in those first few weeks after Doug’s death. I was also in the middle of a major rewrite of my second novel Night Songs, and the intersections between that book and what happened to him were eerie in their own right. 

The story follows a mother and daughter grappling with a family curse, and it is partly inspired by a family I know where the men have tended to die young, and always in sudden, tragic ways. When I started writing, it was still just fiction to me. But then Doug died, and suddenly, what the characters in Night Songs were going through didn’t feel so fictional anymore; their suffering was real and powerful.

I thought of how isolated and terrified Doug must have felt, finding himself in a nightmarish world he did not recognize and that no one else could see or understand. Desperately wishing he could go back to the steady man he once was, because that was the only version anyone, including himself, could accept.  

Rewriting Night Songs felt like a kind of penance. If I couldn’t travel back and give Doug the empathy I wish I had at the time, then at least I could do it now, through these characters and through this book. With Night Songs, I could offer a redemption story, and a fantasy for anyone who has lost someone to suicide. A character who fails the first time, and is given a second chance at saving a life.

Suicide inevitably inspires this kind of thought exercise: what if I had done this, or said this? What if I’d gotten them the right help? What if I had pinned them down by the wrists and stayed with them until the feeling passed? 

Ten weeks after Doug’s death, on what would have been his 55th birthday, I found out I was pregnant with my first child. The world can feel crueler after you go through something as painful and shocking as suicide, but now something new was growing out of its mean earth.

My stepfather’s death and my daughter’s birth are now forever linked. That is why I dedicated the book to both of them — it felt like one life was ending and another one was beginning, another truth hard to articulate when asked about my pregnancy or my daughter’s birth. 

Perhaps there was nothing I could have done to alter Doug’s course. I know not every crisis can be averted, or that every person can be saved. But it’s important to me to share these stories, so that these deaths aren’t shrouded in mystery, becoming mystical legends passed down through family lore, set at a distance, as if they could never happen to you. 

This was something I came to realize in the final draft of Night Songs: only in sharing how it really felt to witness my stepfather’s unraveling do we stand a chance of breaking the cycle. Only through digging deeper into someone’s suffering, perhaps even climbing into the hole with them for a while, do we stand a chance of saving one another. 

Night Songs comes out on Aug. 11 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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