By Yong Shu Hoong

A non-fiction book on grief and loss is hardly what you would expect of a bestseller. But for Singapore publisher Ethos Books, Linda Collins' Loss Adjustment is not only one of its top-selling titles for 2019, but it has also made its way into several year-end best-of booklists, including those of The Straits Times, Singapore Unbound and Wardah Books. The book has also been acquired by Awa Press for publication in New Zealand and Australia.

A New Zealander, Collins has lived and worked as a copyeditor in Singapore for many years. Loss Adjustment started as a thesis project for her MA in Creative Writing, which she obtained in 2017 from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Grappling with the death by suicide of her 17-year-old daughter, Victoria McLeod (excerpts from her diaries are interwoven into Collins' text), Loss Adjustment strikes a chord with many of its fans. For example, a reader on the Goodreads website identified herself as "someone who has struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts" before commenting that the book "greatly pulled on my heartstrings… a difficult read, but an honest and beautifully-written memoir."

In 2018, Collins also decided to study poetry by attending night classes at Lasalle College of the Arts and later online with American poets, Michael Montlack and Matthew Lippman. Her non-fiction and poetry have appeared in Turbine, The Cordite Review, Swamp Living, The Fib Review and more. In 2020, Math Paper Press will be publishing Collins' poetry collection, The Grief Box.

  1. What are you reading right now?
The Pocket Mirror by Janet Frame (never to be finished); Bluets by Maggie Nelson; Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer and Poems 4 (Resurgence) by Yeng Pway Ngon.  

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
A young me: Sam, in Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower. To find out what she meant to my late daughter, Victoria. Me now: Bukowski's womanising Henry Chinaski. For character research.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I am Australian.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
Scotland's Janice Galloway, for her memoir This is Not About Me, and how it is. Victoria, whom I regard as Loss Adjustment's co-author.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
Sometimes the words can't be heard as you have turned deaf.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
A deep understanding of human nature and motivation.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
The venal, competitive process of getting your writing into the world. I've been fortunate that my publisher Ethos Books, led by Ng Kah Gay, is sensitive and supportive.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
"Rage, rage against the dying of the (strobe) light." T.S. Eliot and me.

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
helped write Singapore's 2010 National Day slogan: Live our dreams. Fly our flag.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
Slow, beautiful films with English subtitles do it for me.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Metronome. Dotage.

12. Write a short-short story in three sentences that include the following three words: "seed", "wood" and "sunset".
The book falls from those claws, my hands, and I glimpse my last sunset: a burst of wood from the fire sends a red-hot seed to the pink of – dusk, my eye, the memory of a kiss? Ah yes, mummy's lips on mine, her child. So it's true, what they say – God, how depressing; she was a complete bitch.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
Not an object, but a feeling: excitement.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
At any moment the amygdala might tell you that a lion has entered the cave that is your head. Mendelssohn's The Cave strikes up and you finally have your ending.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Zadie Smith's third-person Archie Jones from White Teeth, the "I" persona of Alfian Sa'at's 'Singapore You Are Not My Country', and a first-person omniscient narrator who is both the Proust-interview "me" and Coetzee's Foe Susan. Why? To find out whose last supper this really is.

16. Between your appetite for lifelong learning and the many book ideas you're hoping to materialise, do you feel it's more a delicate act of shifting gears, or one passion voraciously feeding the other?
It has more to do with pressing mortality and finding my interior self so late in life. Creativity consumes me. There is no element of choice. I think it is partly to do with the fact that I have no family to prove that I once existed.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
I write about this in Loss Adjustment. Suicide memoirists, eh, so grim. Facebook's Death Kopitiam group is my safe place.

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