Hero of 2024: Amanda Petrusich

Mother Jones illustration; Courtesy Amanda Peustrich

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

Is there any good and normal way to be on social media? It seems like a silly thing to ponder. But against the backdrop of increasingly unhealthy platforms, all the clamoring for our attention with aggressive algorithms and useless information, the question can be clarifying. What the hell are we still doing on this? Is there any hope online?

One affirmative answer could be: Amanda Petrusich.

Now, it isn’t surprising that the writing talents of a staff writer at the New Yorker extend to social media. But discovering Petrusich’s Instagram is like encountering a refuge from artifice. And after stumbling upon her account a little over a year ago—a period that saw a string of not-so-gentle moments in my own life—it’s Petrusich’s window into the private plateaus and valleys of life after her husband, Bret Stetka, suddenly died in 2022 that repeatedly hit me like a brick ever since.

The result has been, to my mind, a rare meditation on grief that avoids the typical trappings of the genre: frustrating platitudes, the insistence that it’s All! Going! To! Be! Okay! That such refreshing authenticity takes place on a platform otherwise teeming with performance makes it all the more extraordinary, each caption seemingly inviting followers to join her on the strange path of bearing it all.

This applies to Pestrusich’s posts about the acute difficulties of single parenthood to all the small joys that make it that much easier to endure. The occasional martini, the thrill of a sunset after a slog of toddler illnesses, a terrific coffee mug. You see it when Petrusich expresses gratitude for community, even when loss feels everywhere. Because here is an Instagram page that isn’t trying to sell me anything; there are no buttons to smash or sponsored tote bags to purchase. None of it is excessive or performative. It’s just real stuff about hard shit, which in 2024 on Instagram is close to a miracle.

You may not know Petrusich personally. You may not even be familiar with her New Yorker criticism. But follow her on Instagram and you can’t help but root for her. So I reached out to her, the one good and honest Instagram user, about all this. Here she is below in her own words:

I can’t identify the exact moment I stumbled upon your Instagram. But I recall being immediately taken by your openness—what felt, to me, this rare invitation into private corners of grief. Can you take me through your decision process or willingness to be public about your experience?

I started seeing a trauma therapist right after Bret died, when I was still in a state of acute shock and disorientation. I would sit on his little beige couch, unshowered, in the same disgusting sweatshirt I’d been wearing for who knows how long, and he would take his glasses on and off and command me, over and over again, to grieve. At the time, I found this approach aggressive, nearly ridiculous—I was grieving! All I was fucking doing was grieving! Yet I eventually came to understand that directive—grieve—as crushingly profound. Grief is an active process and you have to participate in it with purpose and clarity. Otherwise, your body will do its best to fight the feeling off, like a virus. 

The whole culture of grief, insomuch as there is a culture of grief in America, is hyper-fixated on survival, on ideas of triumph and subjugation, moving on and getting over it. I’m not sure any of those things are possible or even desirable. That way of thinking also leads to a funny kind of binary: Either you’re okay or you’re not okay. Whereas the reality of grief is that you will be both very okay and very not okay. I think maybe the way that I post on Instagram sort of speaks to that duality a little—you know, here’s a picture of a record I love, and here’s a really good martini, and here’s my kid doing something cute, and now I am sad again, and here’s another record, etc. Grief is braided into my life. That works for me—letting it in rather than pushing it out.

In the beginning, I was trying to understand my own loneliness, too. I was living in the woods with a cat and a baby, both beloved and glorious creatures, but also nonverbal, needy, mysterious—the only words my daughter knew at the time were “Mama,” “Dada,” and “wow.” I had never lived on my own before. Bret and I had recently moved from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley, near where I was born and brought up, but all of my closest friends were still an hour away in the city. Even before Bret died, it had felt like an unusually cloistered and quiet moment in our lives. There were random pandemic restrictions in place. We had a newborn; I was working from home. Then the person I’d spent almost every day of the last 20 years with was gone, quickly and irrevocably, as though he had fallen through a trapdoor. Instagram is not an ideal platform for earnest emoting, but it was easy and immediate and available on my phone. I wanted to be honest about what I was feeling because I was hungry for connection and because not being honest felt antithetical to the work of grief. It has also been useful for me in terms of eradicating or at least softening my own shame about feeling sad.

From afar, you seem to write and think about all of this with such remarkable ease. Personally, I really struggle to get real with my emotions when writing; I find myself constantly reverting to weird forms of self-deprecation. How do you get there? 

Gosh, that’s incredibly kind—thank you. One thing I’ve learned in my career as a critic is that art only works if it’s true. It just has to be true. Over time, I’ve come to recognize tenderness and vulnerability as things I consistently value and seek out in other people’s work, and I think that has made it a little easier for me to embrace them in my own writing, though there are definitely times where I feel sheepish or embarrassed about being so…present. But for me, losing Bret was so raw—so transformative, so terrifying, so inexplicable, so overwhelming—that I just became disinterested in anything that felt too careful or mediated or false. Because, you know, life is completely insane! I think a lot about a line from Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” a perfect song about yearning and ache and hope, where he sings, “Losing love is like a window to your heart / Everybody sees you’re blown apart.” There’s a funny kind of freedom in being blown apart. Perfection is impossible, and also far less appealing. Once you’ve lived through catastrophe, it’s easier to be, like, “Oh, who cares!” about almost everything else, including potentially embarrassing yourself.

What have the responses been to your posts on grief and losing your husband?

Just extraordinary. I am assuming most people follow me because they have read my music criticism in the New Yorker, not because they know what happened to my family, but it’s been beautiful to see how many really hang in there for the other stuff, too. Grief is a universal experience, but we’re all so ill-equipped to navigate it, and especially to navigate it alone. Yet there are very few places where we can navigate it together.

I’m a magazine writer; I’m not an influencer or a therapist. I never imagined that I would be involved in any sort of public dialogue about grief. But it really helps to hold our darkest and most lonesome feelings with other people, especially in ways that maybe aren’t overly prescriptive or results-oriented. Sometimes it’s useful just to pipe up and say: “This sucks. This hurts and feels bad. If you are also in the weeds, I’m here and I get it.” I am so stupidly grateful to have connected with so many grieving people via social media, a medium we all recognize as generally toxic and fucked. I joke around that there should be a grief support program similar in structure to AA, where you get a sponsor, you work the steps, you take it one day at a time. When you need to, you go to a meeting and sit in a folding chair and drink stale coffee and eat supermarket cookies, and tell your story to people who have also gone through it. Maybe when you make it a year out—a milestone for every grieving person I know—someone hands you a little chip that you can hold in your hand. In the US, the average bereavement leave is three to five days, which is so cruel, it’s almost hilarious. I mean, that’s not even gonna get you to the funeral. Outside of a religious context, there are just not enough systems or rituals in place to help people who are unmoored and hurting.

As a parent of a young kid myself, I have also greatly appreciated your willingness to get real about how difficult some moments can be. More so than any mom influencer, Big Little Feelings caption, etc. How has your experience with motherhood played into your writing?

For one, I am perpetually and grievously sleep-deprived, which I fear gives everything I write a kind of psychedelic quiver. Like grief, I think parenthood is an experience that makes you more open, more human, more complicated, more exposed. Those are all really good things for art. But of course, both grief and parenthood can be totally obliterating. It can make you feel like a stupid cartoon, sobbing while cramming yet another load of laundry into the machine or changing another diaper in the middle of the night.

In my experience, both motherhood and grief are also invisible burdens, a weight you carry that no one else sees. Both are exhausting. I still struggle with effectively explaining the experience of having a full-time job and also solo parenting a toddler—most people simply can’t wrap their heads around the math. I do not have any organically occurring free time. All of my free time is bought and sacrificed for. But my daughter has nonetheless made me a better writer. (It goes without saying that she has made me a better person.) It’s a cliché and wildly corny, but kids teach you so much about joy, wonder, curiosity, hope, and the comfort of sacrifice. (Having a child is certainly not the only way to learn those things—there are many other ways.) And the act of caregiving is profound and life-changing work, even if the culture does not necessarily frame it that way.

My daughter was only 13 months old when Bret died. Taking care of a baby alone through that early period of grief was by far the hardest thing I have ever done. It was impossible, actually. Yet it happened. I felt empty, devastated, ruined, lost, absent, brittle, utterly destroyed. But of course, she still needed me, and in a very primal and immediate way. I am so proud of both of us for making it through that first year.

Talking about grief and trauma tends to see a lot of clichés—and it’s one of the main reasons I’ve avoided writing about my own traumas. Have there been any models for you?

I am a huge fan of Anderson Cooper’s podcast, All There Is, and especially his conversation with Stephen Colbert (full disclosure, I was a guest on the show’s second season). Nick Cave is just remarkable on grief; his book Faith, Hope, and Carnage and also his newsletter, The Red Hand Files, are about as good as it gets when it comes to making sense of pain. My dear friend Matthew Schnipper has a book coming out soon about the loss of his son, Renzo; he wrote a piece about grief and music for the New Yorker that’s just unbelievably good. Rob Sheffield’s Love Is A Mix Tape and Jayson Greene’s Once More We Saw Stars are books by friends that I loved long before I suddenly understood them in a different way. It’s less explicitly about grief, and it’s not writing, but I am thoroughly and consistently moved by Tabitha Soren’s photography, which conveys a great deal about loss and ephemerality, violence, and survival.