“Under the whispering door”

[Trigger warning: death, loss, grief.]

[Spoiler alert: some details about the book “Under the whispering door”.]

Two nights ago, I finished reading TJ Klune’s book Under the whispering door. 

I had to take it real slow at the end, the last 50-60 pages being extremely sensitive and possibly triggering for me. I’m still unable to dwell on it for too long, despite the “happy ending”. 

It is a beautiful book. Definitely an adult book — I know of parents who read TJ Klune’s book The house in the cerulean sea to their teenage or pre-teen kids, and I think that’s appropriate, but I believe Under the whispering door is just for adults. It’s a book about grief: death and loss and grief. And also hope and love and life, which always prevail in the end. But grief is ever-present and pervasive in this book. 

In his Acknowledgements at the end of the book, TJ Klune writes: “Under the whispering door is a deeply personal story to me; therefore, it was very hard to write. It took a lot out of me to finish, as it forced me to explore my own grief over losing someone I loved very much, more than I ever had before […].There is a catharsis to grief, though we don’t usually see that in the midst of it. I won’t say writing this book helped heal me, because that would be a lie. Instead, I’ll say that it left me feeling a bit more hopeful than before, bittersweetly so. If you live long enough to learn to love someone, you’ll know grief at one point or another.” 

I feel the same about reading his book Under the whispering door. Substitute the word “write” with “read” in the sentence above, and it could have been my own words. 

I won’t be able to do what I’ve done with the other books I’ve read by TJ Klune, i.e. go back and reread some of my favorite pages or chapters immediately. I probably won’t be able to do it for a very long time, maybe never. But this book will have a very special place in my heart and in my soul as will the two people who gave me a copy of this book and the two persons that this book reminds me of. 

—————— 

[Spoiler alert: some details about the story and characters in “Under the whispering door”.]

Among the five books by TJ Klune that I’ve read, Under the whispering door is my favorite. Apart from it being a book that feels very personal to me because of its topics, I also like the fact that three of the four main human characters (the fifth main character is a dog) are people of color — something still unusual in many books, unfortunately, even in TJ Klune’s other books. I also like that most of the story has an “ace vibe” to me: I don’t know if it’s meant to be that way, given that it’s a ghost and a living man falling in love without being able to touch each other at all; but to me, it felt “very ace” and as such very comforting, comfortable, and affirming. 

The main critique I have to this book — and to all of TJ Klune’s books that I’ve read so far — is that cis-normativity and amatonormativity are still too blatant and pervasive. I love the feeling of “warm, gay blanket” I get from these books but it’s always a little ruined by that ever-present background of cis-normativity and amatonormativity.