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.

Module 2: The Myth of the Perfect Family

On the surface, Madeline's family looked perfect. A successful husband, a brilliant daughter, a beautiful home in an affluent suburb. But beneath that polished veneer, communication was broken. Fabiaschi masterfully dissects how families can live under the same roof yet exist in completely different realities.

A core issue is the disconnect in how family members perceive each other’s lives. Eve, trying to understand her mother, washes dishes and concludes that Madeline’s life was just a series of thankless tasks, like an "indentured servant." From the afterlife, Madeline is horrified by this simplistic, dismissive view. She sees how her daughter completely misunderstood her identity. This leads to a painful truth. Children often possess a fundamentally flawed understanding of their parents' inner lives. They see the roles, not the people. They see the "mom" or the "dad," but miss the complex individual with their own history, ambitions, and secret pains.

This misunderstanding is fueled by a chronic communication gap. Brady, the pragmatic executive, would call Madeline and ask if he needed to get her a Valentine’s card. For him, asking was fulfilling a task. For her, the question itself negated the sentiment entirely. They were speaking different emotional languages. After Madeline’s death, this gap becomes a chasm. Brady’s unemotional agreement to let Eve attend boarding school is his clumsy attempt to give her what she wants. But Eve hears it as, "I want you gone." So what happens next? Misaligned communication styles create cycles of misunderstanding and unmet needs. Each person acts with what they believe are good intentions, but their actions are interpreted through a lens of grief and resentment, leading to more hurt.

Building on that idea, the story reveals that family histories are filled with unspoken secrets that shape everyone. Brady eventually tells Eve that her grandmother, Madeline’s mother, was an alcoholic who likely died by suicide. Madeline had hidden this from Eve her whole life. She had built her own identity in direct opposition to her mother, vowing never to be weak or let guilt rule her parenting. Unresolved generational trauma shapes present-day family dynamics in invisible ways. Madeline’s entire approach to motherhood was a reaction to her own upbringing. She so desperately wanted to avoid her mother’s path that she created a different, but equally flawed, family structure. Her fear of passing on guilt ironically contributed to a household where real feelings were never discussed, leaving everyone to guess at the truth.