Eden Robins' 'Remember You Will Die' Defies Categorization

Author of short stories, essays, and novels, Eden Robins, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss her intriguing new book, Remember You Will Die. Written as a collection of obituaries, this unique story follows Peregrine, an AI mother, who is dealing with the sudden death of her human daughter, Poppy. Throughout the story, Peregrine searches for clues as to what happened to her daughter, using the obituaries as a way to understand grief and cope with the loss of her child. For Robins, how did she come up with the idea of connecting an AI character with the obituaries that she had written? “I knew with a complicated structure that there needed to be a core, emotional heart of it, and it kind of emerged out of the structure. I didn’t go into this with an idea of what the story was going to be about. I just wanted to write a novel of linked obituaries, and I figured it would all come together at some point… I would sit down every day and just think of what I was interested in that day and come up with a person who lived that life… overtime, this story started to emerge… it occurred to me that there could be an entity that wasn’t human who was struggling with this idea of grief and what it meant to grieve and what it meant to experience loss, but having no context or knowledge of how that’s supposed to go… and I thought maybe they were searching through obituaries to deal with it, and then just came the question of why? What is this grief that this AI is experiencing, and that’s how that story started to come together.”

One of the recurring themes throughout the book is flowers, particularly poppies and roses. Robins explained why she included these specific flowers in her novel. “Poppies are a really interesting flower because they in grow places that no other things can. They will grow on battlefields, they will grow in lands that no other living thing can grow. You have this beautiful, bright poppy, and there’s something about the idea of something beautiful growing in the midst of devastation that I had on my mind while writing this book, and I think it’s a lot of what this book is about… [that] even in the worst possible moments there is something tenacious and beautiful that is coming to life at the same time… It is the symbol of WWI, Remembrance Day… and so it is a really powerful symbol for a lot of people because of that… roses, for me… I’ve never been interested in roses before, then I started reading about them… both of these are names, Rose and Poppy, so they can be embodied by human beings, but a rose has in itself that combination of the thorn and the rose, the pain and the beauty, and I just think these things are inextricable…”