“Healing” is the cleanest lie contemporary fiction keeps selling. A story gets branded as balm, a protagonist “processes,” a reader feels virtuous for consuming pain with a soft soundtrack. The grief is curated, the trauma is tasteful, and the ending hands you a receipt that says you’ve grown. Angie Spoto doesn’t write that kind of comfort product. She writes the fantasy version of what the wellness industry tries to hide: that healing is power, and power always has a price.
Spoto’s imagination is ferociously transactional. She’s not interested in grief as a private, poetic weather system that makes characters “deep.” She’s interested in grief as labour, as currency, as something the wealthy would absolutely outsource if they could. The Grief Nurse takes the most sanctimonious modern assumption—pain makes you human, therefore pain is noble—and flips it into a gothic economy where elite families buy themselves immunity. That premise isn’t cute allegory. It’s an accusation aimed straight at a culture that treats care as service work and expects the worker to smile while carrying everyone else’s weight.
Lynx, the grief nurse at the centre, is the anti-hero “healing narrative” never wants to admit exists: the caregiver whose own relationship to suffering is complicated, resentful, sometimes ugly. Spoto refuses the saintly caretaker trope. She writes a young woman shaped by the job, deformed by it, and still expected to perform purity. That’s the sharpness in her work: she doesn’t fetishise empathy. She shows how empathy gets extracted, packaged, and used as status maintenance.
Spoto understands that “healing” is often just pain redistribution with better branding: someone still bleeds, the only question is who gets billed for it.
She stages grief as something with physical consequence—felt, held, transferred—because she doesn’t trust abstraction. If sadness can be “handled,” then it can be commodified, policed, and stolen. That’s the point. The book’s gothic mansion-and-island insulation isn’t there for atmosphere; it’s there to show how wealth creates sealed environments where the rich can pretend feeling is optional, and where everyone else becomes infrastructure.
Then The Bone Diver leans into folklore and coastal gothic, and again she chooses the opposite of the market’s preferred mood. Myth, in Spoto’s hands, isn’t a cosy inheritance you can drape over a modern plot like a shawl. It’s an ultimatum. Selkie legend becomes a way to talk about bodily autonomy, inheritance, and the brutal bargains families make when they’re desperate to keep a story intact. She writes “choice” the way it often exists in real life: as a corridor with the doors already locked.
This is where her psyche comes into focus. Spoto writes like someone allergic to the inspirational arc, suspicious of narratives that turn suffering into aesthetic. Her work keeps circling the same moral sore: societies love grief in theory, but despise grieving people in practice. They want you to be brave, quiet, efficient. They want your pain to be legible and temporary, preferably profitable. When it isn’t—when it spills, when it stains—institutions move in to contain it. In her fiction, the containment is literal. The horror is procedural.
Her non-fiction work on HIV narrative reinforces the same stance: she’s drawn to stigmas that communities pretend are “solved” so they can stop looking. That’s why her novels don’t land like gentle catharsis. They land like a hand pressed to a bruise: the ache proves it’s still there.
Where a typical healing story offers closure, Spoto offers contagion—pain that moves through rooms, families, and myths, refusing to behave for an audience that wants to feel cleansed.
And that’s what “leaving the stitches visible” really means with her. She doesn’t sew up the wound and call it hope. She shows you the thread, the tug, the uneven seam where people tried to repair something with the wrong materials. Her endings don’t pat your head. They insist you notice the system that created the damage and the people who benefit when damage gets repackaged as personal growth.
If you come to Spoto looking for a book that will reassure you about resilience, you’ll end up irritated—and you should. Her work keeps saying the quiet part out loud: the culture doesn’t want healed people; it wants compliant ones. Read her accordingly. Don’t ask for comfort. Sit with what she refuses to tidy, and let it keep refusing.
