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It is not novelty that distinguishes a novel, but the precision of its voice and the sincerity of its gaze. Leslie A. Rasmussen’s When People Leave arrives with both: a gentle dissonance between grief and wit, an intimacy that feels eavesdropped rather than narrated, and an emotional resonance that lingers like the aftertaste of something both bitter and sweet.
Leslie is no stranger to the mechanics of dialogue. Her early writing life unfolded in the sitcom trenches of the 1990s, penning punchlines for the likes of Roseanne, a pedigree that shows in the rhythm of her prose and in her characters’ finely tuned repartee. But When People Leave trades the studio audience for the echo of an empty house. It is a novel propelled by loss, specifically, the suicide of a seemingly buoyant mother, and the ripples that loss sets off in the lives of her three adult daughters. Yet it resists the solemnity such a premise might suggest. Instead, Leslie leans into tonal complexity, finding, in the barbed affection of sisterhood, a kind of comedic oxygen.
The structure is familiar enough: an inciting tragedy, a return to the family hearth, a gradual excavation of buried truths. But Leslie gives the narrative a kinetic charge. From Los Angeles to Las Vegas to the nostalgic grid of Brooklyn, the sisters chase clues not just to their mother’s final hours but to the untold architecture of her life. Theirs is not the neat closure of a whodunit, but the rawer, more ambivalent discovery of who they are in light of what they never knew.
Each sister is etched with precision. There’s the eldest, a woman held together by sarcasm and Scotch; the middle child, a therapist drowning in her own relational blind spots; and the youngest, outwardly settled but privately restless, her marriage to a childhood sweetheart now ringed with existential doubt. These are not archetypes but contradictions, shaped, often invisibly, by the secrets they’ve inherited. Rasmussen, who claims to be “not an idea person,” builds her novel from voices, from the dialogue that surfaces in her mind like overheard conversations at a dinner party she didn’t mean to attend.
The humor here is not garnish but gristle, it carries weight. The sisters speak in code, in knowing glances and barbed asides, in the kind of shorthand forged in childhood and calcified by grief. Leslie understands that humor is not a distraction from sorrow but one of its native tongues. “If you can have a little humor,” she says, echoing a maxim of the sitcom world, “you can survive anything.” This isn’t sentimentality, but survival instinct.
What prompted the novel, Leslie has said, was the quiet epidemic of suicides among outwardly high-functioning people, a dissonance that haunts every page. The mother in When People Leave is cheerful, social, seemingly fulfilled. Her death feels not just tragic but inexplicable, as if the narrative of her life had suddenly skipped a beat. This, Leslie suggests, is the terrifying truth about the people we love: that they may be strangers to us in ways we never dared imagine.
For Leslie, the shift from the collaborative cacophony of television to the monastic solitude of novel-writing offered new creative latitude. In the writers’ rooms of her past, humor was a group project; now, it is something closer to alchemy, a way to transform sorrow into story. Her reflections on grief are shaped by personal loss, the death of her father, and by a recognition that mourning is not a straight line but a looping, recursive path, as full of laughter as it is of tears.
This sense of circularity defines the sisters’ journey. The closer they get to the truth, the more their mother recedes, not as an enigma, but as a human being, capable of flaws and concealments. When People Leave doesn’t pretend that knowledge heals all wounds. Sometimes it widens them. But it also offers, if not absolution, then understanding, a fragile but luminous thread that might just hold the broken pieces together.
In the end, what Leslie Rasmussen offers is not a treatise on death, but a meditation on aftermath, on what it means to stay when someone else has chosen to go. Her novel hums with the recognition that life, even after shattering, is still lived in the small details: in a shared joke, a remembered gesture, the stubborn resilience of family. When People Leave is about absence, yes, but also about the quiet, stubborn presence of love, and the ways it refuses to vanish.