(By Nora Reiner ’29, staff writer)
First-year students gathered in Miller Chapel on Tuesday, Sept. 9, to hear the inside scoop on the first-year experience (FYE) common connection novel, “The Collected Regrets of Clover”, straight from the author, Mikki Brammer.
Similarly to the protagonist of the novel, Clover, Brammer was a child who struggled with death due to the passing of various family members. As a New Yorker in 2020, Brammer was surrounded by ambulance sirens, neighbors on stretchers and the growing death count on the nightly news. This immersion in death caused Brammer to face her fear head on.
Inspired to write a happy and hopeful book about grief, Brammer began researching death doulas and cafes, which began Clover’s story. This novel allowed Brammer to work through her feelings of death and grief before they occurred in her own life.
Moved by her research, Brammer decided to capture her beloved mother in a form that would never leave her: video. Brammer recorded normal conversations with her mother about topics Brammer had always been curious about.
When asked about her perspective on life, Brammer encouraged everyone to be “cautiously reckless” and to “take calculated risks” in their own lives. She believes that when she continually faces rejection, it is purely the world’s way of redirecting her toward a new path. Currently, she is working to become more vulnerable to the people she meets.
In her debut novel, which was awarded Best Book of Summer 2023 by The New York Times Book Review, Best Book of 2023 by NPR and Goodreads Choice Awards nominee for Readers’ Favorite Fiction and Debut Novel in 2023, Mikki Brammer wrote, “But the key to a beautiful death is to live a beautiful life. Putting your heart out there. Letting it get broken. Taking chances. Making mistakes.”