{"id":857,"date":"2026-08-09T15:22:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T15:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adsandthings.com\/winews\/2026\/08\/09\/my-stepfather-died-by-suicide-a-week-before-my-first-book-came-out-the-connections-were-eerie-exclusive-essay\/"},"modified":"2026-08-09T15:22:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-09T15:22:58","slug":"my-stepfather-died-by-suicide-a-week-before-my-first-book-came-out-the-connections-were-eerie-exclusive-essay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adsandthings.com\/winews\/2026\/08\/09\/my-stepfather-died-by-suicide-a-week-before-my-first-book-came-out-the-connections-were-eerie-exclusive-essay\/","title":{"rendered":"My Stepfather Died by Suicide a Week Before My First Book Came Out. The Connections Were Eerie (Exclusive Essay)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI was being drawn back to that same town, to those same woods that inspired the book, to confront a real-life horror,\u201d writes \u2018Night Songs\u2019 author Alli Dyer<\/p>\n

\"Alli
Alli Dyer and her stepfather and her new book \u2018Night Songs\u2019
Credit: Courtesy of Alli Dyer; Atria<\/i><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A week before my first novel Strange Folk<\/em><\/a> was released in August 2024, my stepfather walked into the woods surrounding my parents\u2019 home in rural Virginia and shot himself.<\/p>\n

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 <\/em>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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the weeks that followed, when strangers and acquaintances asked me about having Strange Folk<\/em> published, I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t be honest with them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Saying the words themselves felt like an act of violence. Even now, I feel guilty putting them in the first line of this essay.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But at the same time, it\u2019s freeing to finally say them out loud.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He was also the last person I ever expected to die by suicide.<\/p>\n

He was a mountain man, as my family liked to say, but not a caricature of one. A real<\/em> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Alli
Alli and Doug
Credit: Courtesy of Alli Dyer<\/i><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This steadiness also came with a rigidity \u2014 he didn\u2019t understand people who were different from him,\u00a0or things he\u2019d never experienced, like my brother\u2019s 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\u2019m not excusing how he hurt us over the years \u2014 that is real, and it is important to acknowledge, especially now that he\u2019s gone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But at least he was steady.<\/p>\n

So in March of 2024, when my mother told me he was struggling at work, I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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And yet, this error was like a piece of sand in the perfectly calibrated machine of his mind. He couldn\u2019t understand how something like this could have happened and now, he saw potential errors, potential dangers<\/em>, everywhere. The world was no longer a safe, reliable place.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019t cope. His doctor believed this as well, and so they put him on various medications that didn\u2019t help. I thought he just needed to adapt and find the right medication, and he would be fine.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019t happen to someone like him, that anxiety or mental illness wasn\u2019t real<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d been incurious about people who were different from him.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Alli
Alli Dyer
Credit: Jacob Boll<\/i><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2019t exist, some way out of his own skin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Before he left, he apologized for not being more empathetic to my struggles with anxiety, or to my siblings\u2019 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\u2019s life so hard. So we could get back to normal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So when he took his own life at the end of July, it wasn\u2019t just a tragedy. It was a betrayal, and a mystery.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How could he have done such a thing? He, of all people?<\/p>\n

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When our family talked about it afterward, we said it wasn\u2019t him. He wasn\u2019t 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll never really know. He didn\u2019t leave a note of any kind. Only his wallet placed on top of the gun safe where he kept his grandfather\u2019s pistol.<\/p>\n

Strange Folk <\/em>wasn\u2019t the only book in my head in those first few weeks after Doug\u2019s death. I was also in the middle of a major rewrite of my second novel Night Songs<\/em><\/a>, and the intersections between that book and what happened to him were eerie in their own right.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The story follows <\/em>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.\u00a0But then Doug died, and suddenly, what the characters in Night Songs<\/em> were going through didn\u2019t feel so fictional anymore; their suffering was real and powerful.<\/p>\n

\"\u2018Night
\u2018Night Songs\u2019 by Alli Dyer
Credit: Atria<\/i><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rewriting Night Songs<\/em> felt like a kind of penance. If I couldn\u2019t 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<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

Suicide inevitably inspires this kind of thought exercise: what if I had done this, or said this? What if I\u2019d gotten them the right help? What if I had pinned them down by the wrists and stayed with them until the feeling passed?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ten weeks after Doug\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

My stepfather\u2019s death and my daughter\u2019s birth are now forever linked. That is why I dedicated the book to both of them \u2014 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\u2019s birth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps there was nothing I could have done to alter Doug\u2019s course. I know not every crisis can be averted, or that every person can be saved.\u00a0But it\u2019s important to me to share these stories, so that these deaths aren\u2019t shrouded in mystery, becoming mystical legends passed down through family lore, set at a distance, as if they could never happen to you.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This was something I came to realize in the final draft of Night <\/em>Songs: only in sharing how it really felt to witness my stepfather\u2019s unraveling do we stand a chance of breaking the cycle. Only through digging deeper into someone\u2019s suffering, perhaps even climbing into the hole with them for a while, do we stand a chance of saving one another.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Night Songs<\/em><\/a> comes out on Aug. 11 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.<\/p>\n

We independently evaluate all recommended products and services. If you click on links we provide, we may receive compensation.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI was being drawn back to that same town, to those same woods that inspired the book, to confront a real-life horror,\u201d writes \u2018Night Songs\u2019 author Alli Dyer Alli Dyer and her stepfather and her new book \u2018Night Songs\u2019Credit: Courtesy of Alli Dyer; Atria A week before my first novel Strange Folk was released in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everything-else"],"wpmagazine_modules_lite_featured_media_urls":{"thumbnail":"","cvmm-medium":"","cvmm-medium-plus":"","cvmm-portrait":"","cvmm-medium-square":"","cvmm-large":"","cvmm-small":"","full":""},"categories_names":{"1":{"name":"Everything Else","link":"https:\/\/adsandthings.com\/winews\/category\/everything-else\/"}},"tags_names":[],"comments_number":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adsandthings.com\/winews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adsandthings.com\/winews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adsandthings.com\/winews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adsandthings.com\/winews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adsandthings.com\/winews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adsandthings.com\/winews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adsandthings.com\/winews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adsandthings.com\/winews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adsandthings.com\/winews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}