The Collected Regrets of Clover, by Mikki Brammer (St. Martin’s Press, 314 pages)
Clover Brooks is 36, single and surrounded by death — not the thing you’d want to put on a Tinder profile. The lifetime New Yorker lives alone in a rent-controlled apartment she shared with her grandfather growing up and she works as a death doula — the opposite of a birth doula. She sits with dying people, ensuring that they don’t die alone and helping them to process their pain and other complicated emotions they are experiencing. She keeps three notebooks in which she records notes; they are labeled “Regrets,” “Advice” and “Confessions.”
That’s what you need to know to understand the title of The Collected Regrets of Clover, a debut novel from Mikki Brammer, an Australian transplant who has a remarkable level of knowledge of New York City, where she lives now. It is a surprisingly upbeat novel, given the subject matter. The protagonist is a lonely young woman who has been hobbled by grief, having lost both parents as a child and, later, more traumatically, the grandfather who raised her. You might call her death-haunted; the first line of the novel is, “The first time I watched someone die, I was five.” (It was her kindergarten teacher.)
Clover does not have much of a life outside her work, caring for her two cats and a low-maintenance dog and keeping up with her neighbors. The only thing she does with any regularity is attend an occasional death cafe — a group where people gather to talk about death and enjoy refreshments (yes, this is a thing) — and every weekend have breakfast out and visit the bookstore she used to frequent with her grandfather before he passed more than a decade ago.
The few friends she has are old, and they include the 70-something bookstore owner and an elderly man who lives in her building and has known her since childhood. An only child who never learned to be social, she sees no reason to make friends and finds all the companionship and solace she needs in her structured life and in her books. Or so she thinks.
You probably see where this is going. Which is the only problem with this generally engaging book.
From the moment Brammer introduces a character named Sebastian, an overly enthusiastic visitor to a death cafe who tries to befriend Clover, there is a likely trajectory of this story. Our heroine will resist Sebastion’s overtures for only so long, and eventually he will bring her the companionship and love that she has long resisted. (She has never, she reveals, uttered the words “I love you” nor had them said to her — although her grandfather, a biology professor at Columbia University, clearly loved Clover deeply, he wasn’t one to say it, and her parents, whom she only vaguely remembers, had been more interested in each other than their child before they died in an accident while visiting China.)
To her credit, Brammer doesn’t follow that well-trampled plot, at least not completely. Instead, the story takes a sharp detour when Clover takes on a new client who, at 91, is dying of pancreatic cancer and has two months to live. Although she had a good marriage and a fulfilling life, she has long wondered if her life would have been better if she had married another man, someone she fell in love with when she was young and living in France. Clover does some research and finds the man seems to be living in Maine, so she sets off on a New England road trip to find him to fulfill the dying woman’s last wish.
In many ways The Collected Regrets of Clover is a literary death cafe — it is populated with millennials who grew up in families uncomfortable with talking about life’s end and who therefore are eager to explore the subject — everything from the legality of burial at sea to burial suits made out of compostable mushrooms. From Clover’s work to her memories to the visits to death cafes, the novel is one long conversation about grief and death. It’s a subject that the author seems to know something about.
One character says, “Someone told me once that [grief is like] a bag that you always carry — it starts out as a large suitcase, and as the years go by, it might reduce to the size of a purse, but you carry it forever.”
Clover has been carrying her own grief for reasons that unfold throughout the novel, and while it’s not an especially complicated story, it’s competently told and has enough light twists to keep readers engaged. The squeamish need not worry; death is largely a concept here; there are no unsettling depictions of the stages of decomposition or other things that happen to the body after we die. Nor does Brammer take up any discussion about the existence (or not) of an afterlife.
In a writing group she joined while she was working on the book, Brammer told others that she was trying to write a book about death “that’s fun and uplifting.” Strange as that sounds, she succeeded. B
