Reading Star Wars Books In Times of Grief
What do we turn to when we need to look away?
There is a new Star Wars book coming out at the beginning of March, and another new one in April. I am sure the closer we get to those new releases, the more enthusiastic I will feel. Right now, all I want to do is go back to the books I know will make me feel okay.
Grief has a way of turning us toward the familiar. We seek refuge in the things we know won’t hurt us, because we’re already hurting too much to risk more suffering. I am hurting so deeply that even writing—the thing that has always been my escape—is almost too hard. Almost.
Books, though—of the Star Wars variety—they are sustaining me. Today more than they ever have before. They feel like the only things I can tolerate, the only entities that won’t break me into a million pieces.
I have been fighting the urge to start rereading every Star Wars book I have ever read, to start reading Legends chronologically from the beginning. To revisit Star Wars books I didn’t like, and dive back into ones I did.
Because I so desperately want to escape the cage of my own sadness. I know this kind of despair, for me, is temporary, that in a few weeks or a month I might go a whole day without feeling like everything I have ever loved and wanted has been dragged away from the empty shell that used to contain me.
But right now the pain is fresh and it hurts so much that I cannot see the way through it, I know only that the end of it is there and that I’ll reach it if I just keep inching forward.
And it’s in times like these that we reach for our favorite forms of entertainment for comfort. That is all I want. To hold my favorite Star Wars book, to experience the whole story again from beginning to end. To feel something other than my own grief while immersed in those pages. To forget—if that’s possible—all that I have lost.
I’m normally an analytical reader—I like to pull stories apart, to ask their creators how those stories were made. I like thinking about the blank pages that stories eventually became and how nothing transformed into something beautiful.
Not today. Maybe not for a long time. Because to analyze a story right now would mean remembering that I am alive and well and that beautiful things might come from me one day, and that hurts too much to think about. It hurts to go on living without the people and things you no longer have.
While Star Wars books have been an important staple throughout most of my life, they have never mattered more to me than they do right now. Even thinking back to moments in my life when Star Wars books changed me for the better—interviewing the Luminous authors at Star Wars Celebration about The High Republic, or seeing myself in E.K. Johnston’s Ahsoka novel—provides momentary, yet tangible, relief.
I do not have a Star Wars book to hold in my hand at the moment. But if I did, I know which one it would be, and I know I would feel better.
When the general public thinks of book lovers, they don’t consider the side of bibliophilia most don’t talk about—the dimmer side, where we don’t collect books to show them off or read them with intent. todiscuss, but instead to feel anchored in something more stable than the ground we’re being forced to walk on.
For the most part, books do not change once they are published. They are a constant. If you start reading Lost Stars right now, it will be the same book you read a year ago; that is a promise. And it’s a lifeline in times like these, when what you need most is to know the story will not surprise you and that it will end the same way every time you come back to it again.
I cannot change the ending of the chapter I’m witnessing now, and that’s what hurts the most about it. Life is not a book you’ve read before. There is no way to know what the next page holds, nor is there a single thing you can do to guarantee the best possible outcome every time.
Even when a Star Wars book is sad, at least your sad feelings are for something fictional and not for yourself.
These books are not my job or my passion or my aesthetic. They are my foundation when I’ve lost mine. They are the constant presence that keeps me from going under. I hope everyone involved in making Star Wars books knows they aren’t just stories set in space. They are so much more.
They are holding me together like nothing else, for now, can.
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