A Beginner’s Guide to Grief creator Anna Lindner not only dug into the dark corners of her own experience of grief to write about it, she also – wisely – felt that she was the best person to depict her fictional protagonist Harriet (Harry) Wylde.
Grief manifests in so many ways for everyone, but it is a universal experience. Ironically, it can feel like the most alienating and singular experience, and one that we ought to internalise and keep private despite how much compassion and understanding exists if we can try to articulate the impact of our experience.
Lindner is still processing the audience response when we connect via Zoom soon after the show’s release.
“The number of people who have reached out … to express the way that it made them feel in regard to their own journeys, that has been incredibly reaffirming to receive those messages from people who I know, and who I don’t know,” says Lindner.
Lindner’s Harry is on the brink of her best life when everything begins to pummel downhill. She’s headed for the glitz of New York where she’s secured an arts scholarship when she learns within weeks that both her father, Reggie, and mother, Diane, have been diagnosed with terminal cancer. There’s barely a chance for her to process the loss of one parent before she must confront losing both.
“As I started writing this, I couldn’t know for sure if this was going to resonate with anyone, but I was going on a deep instinct in my gut that said, ‘This conversation needs to happen and this exposure to what it’s really like needs to be shared’.”
The show is not only for those who have experienced the illness and death of family, but anyone and everyone who has experienced a sense of shame in not behaving according to invisible, imagined social rules.
“It was that gut thing of thinking ‘I can’t be alone in this’,” says Lindner. “As unique as an experience is to you, and no one else will have that exact same experience, to think you are the only one who is going through something in that severe way would be foolish. That’s the trick of loneliness and isolation, we don’t realise there’s a lot of people who are drowning, who are grieving, experiencing loss like never before.”
‘A Beginner’s Guide to Grief’ takes an honest – and unpredictable – approach to loss. Source: SBS
The silver lining of the pandemic was to democratise the ability to admit “I’m not ok”, knowing that so many others were finding the courage to do so via social media, songs, books, art and Zoom.
“We are trained through our culture and upbringing to keep it to ourselves, not to burden anyone, when in fact the more we communicate what’s really going on, we see there’s community. This is why we spiral, this is why our coping mechanisms – alcohol or whatever we seek to placate our circumstances – are perpetuated, because we feel so much shame about saying ‘I’m in pain, I’m not coping, I’m in a mess that I can’t resurface from’,” Lindner says.
Finding humour in the tumult of chaos and loss comes naturally to her. Expressing that balance on screen was an extension of her own voice.
“My brain operates in this way and has since I was a child. I’ve never shied away from the darkness, and even from a young age I was able to identify the absurdity, which is always woven in somewhere. But, once again, we feel shame around feeling moments of levity, joy and amusement in the space of darkness, grief, loss, where we feel that we should be behaving one way consistently. For me, it comes very naturally.”
Lindner’s gut instinct also told her Renee Mao was her director.
Renee Mao and Anna Lindner on set. Source: SBS
“I was very much a part of the conversation to bring Renee on board. It was a clear yes in my gut when I met her via Zoom. I knew straight away that I really want to work with her. She’s extremely talented and the way that she launched into her interpretation of the project from what she’d read, she was so passionate in the specificity of why she wanted to be involved.
“Her body of work revealed a beautiful sensitivity and that was the big challenge for me, to create a dark comedy that also completely pierced the heart of these very intimate and confronting moments and I didn’t want someone to brush over that nicely. I wanted someone who could see the horror and the beauty in these very intimate moments that I wanted to share with people.”
Lindner has been attempting to write drama, but “the comedy keeps popping up and I’m learning that might be my wheelhouse,” she admits, a laugh teasing at her lips.
“Humour is our medicine, the universe firing free medicine at us all the time. We’re just really well-conditioned to resist it and push it away when it’s happening. There’s no benefit in pushing it away, it’s there to help you survive the mess and the chaos and the pain.”
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In December, A Beginner’s Guide to Grief won the 2022 for Best Digital Series or Channel. A Beginner’s Guide to Grief is streaming now as a six-part short-form series (also available subtitled in , , , and ).
