Funerals don’t always look the way you think they should. Sometimes they look like backyard folding chairs, classic rock, kids tearing around a jump house, coolers full of beer, and relatives needling each other with jokes. Laura Hawbaker’s debut novel, The Afters, grew out of that particular Irish American kind of grief: loud, funny, devastating, and one huge family all crammed into the same Delco rowhome.
The Afters is a one-fateful-day tragicomedy about a Hollywood actress who returns to her hometown for her grandmother’s funeral, only to be kicked out during the eulogy when fans start asking for selfies. Its world draws on Laura’s childhood memories of her mother’s family rowhome in Clifton Heights, just outside Philadelphia, and the legend of a house once bought for a dollar.
Another thread came from Laura’s sideways proximity to Hollywood through her sister, whose behind-the-scenes work taught her about the labor and off-camera absurdity beneath celebrity glamour.
Laura isn’t from Los Angeles, and she isn’t from Delco. She’s in Chicago, a gorgeous skyline wrapped around a parking ticket. Which means setting The Afters in Delco is, in some sense, asking for trouble; no outsider has ever been Delco-accurate enough for Delco. But as one of the “Chicago cousins,” she kept coming back to the place and her family traditions, including Mommom and Poppop Hammond dancing the Mummers Strut at weddings and singing “Under the Boardwalk” under a picnic table at the shore.
Laura is the Prose Review Editor at Another Chicago Magazine and the founder of Masks Literary Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in Linguistics, was a Fulbright Fellow in Poland, and has taught in Hawaii and New Orleans—where she also sold street art in the French Quarter. Her writing explores class, performance, family, and what running from the past does to a person who can never fully leave home.
The Afters is available from Regal House Publishing (2028). Learn more about Laura’s work at www.lahawbaker.com.
