I Liked My Life

Think of a person's life as a well-loved cookbook. Its pages are splattered with the evidence of meals shared—a faint red ring from a wine glass, a dusting of flour, a smudge of chocolate. The binding is soft from use, the corners curled on favorite recipes. Anyone can see it's a book that was cherished, a source of nourishment and joy. Then, one day, the owner tears out a single page—the final one—and vanishes. What are the people left in the kitchen to make of that? Do they focus on the violence of that last act, the sudden, inexplicable void? Or do they look at the hundreds of beautifully stained pages that remain, trying to reconstruct the love that was so clearly there?

This is the devastating puzzle Maddy's family must solve after she dies by suicide. From the afterlife, Maddy watches as her husband, Brady, and her teenage daughter, Eve, grapple not just with their grief, but with the conflicting narratives of the woman they thought they knew. Each holds a different version of Maddy's story, a different set of memories and regrets, and their struggle to reconcile these pieces forms the heart of the novel. This profound exploration of a family's fragmented reality came from a deeply personal place for author Abby Fabiaschi. After a close friend took her own life, Fabiaschi was haunted by the inadequacy of the stories we tell about such tragedies—the simple explanations that flatten a complex, cherished life into a single, dark event. She left a successful career in finance to write I Liked My Life to honor the messy, beautiful, and contradictory pages left behind when a story ends too soon.

Module 1: The Anatomy of Grief

Grief is a messy, isolating force that fractures a family from the inside out. Fabiaschi shows us that grief rarely looks like quiet sadness. Instead, it often manifests as anger, withdrawal, or a desperate search for blame.

After Madeline’s death, her family is left in a silent, dark house. Her husband, Brady, a high-powered executive, finds his grief erupting as rage. His old nickname, "The Fireman," returns as he picks fights and feels a constant urge to either flee or fight. He can’t process sorrow, so he defaults to anger. Their teenage daughter, Eve, processes her grief intellectually. She retreats into herself, analyzing her mother’s death as a final, punishing act. She believes it was a calculated message, a "last fuck you" designed to make them realize what they had lost. This brings us to a crucial insight. Grief is a profoundly individual experience that often creates isolation instead of unity. Brady’s anger and Eve’s analytical withdrawal mean they can’t connect. They are two people grieving the same person, but they are doing it in separate, lonely worlds.

And here’s the thing about social support. It often makes things worse. The book brilliantly captures how well-intentioned sympathy can feel performative and hollow. At school, Eve’s classmates treat her like a "zoo exhibit," either avoiding her or offering clumsy, over-the-top compassion. It all feels fake. At her tennis match, the other parents remove all signs of Mother’s Day, a gesture for their own comfort. It allows them to skip a depressing conversation. The performance of social support often deepens the survivor’s isolation. People are managing their own discomfort. This forces the grieving person to put on their own performance of being okay, creating an even greater disconnect between their inner turmoil and their outward facade.

Finally, Fabiaschi explores the afterlife as a state of frustrating limbo. Madeline is stuck. She watches her family on a "movie screen" with no spiritual guide. Her consciousness persists, but she is powerless, driven by a single, agonizing purpose. The afterlife is presented as a state of unfinished business. Madeline feels she won’t find peace until she can somehow make things right for her family. Her post-death existence is a prison of responsibility. She is forced to watch the consequences of her actions unfold, unable to comfort or explain, desperately trying to nudge her loved ones back toward each other.