The People I Kept

Denise Godreau did not set out to write a book about grief. She set out to write about the people who bring you back to joy.

The People I Kept is a memoir in forty linked essays — forty portraits of a life shaped by love, loss, ambition, and an unrelenting open cut. At the center of everything is Larisa: Denise's daughter, born in 1992, diagnosed at two and a half with Angelman Syndrome — a rare neurogenetic condition that affects her ability to speak or live independently, and that has meant a lifetime of seizures no medication has fully controlled.

The title is not incidental. It is the thesis. Every essay is about someone Denise chose to keep — or who, more precisely, refused to go. What makes this book quietly radical is its resistance to be a misery journal. It insists that persistent grief can be a catalyst for a life filled with ambition and joy. It argues that we can rebuild our lives through the people we allow inside our walls.

By the final essay, when Larisa speaks directly to Denise in her inner voice, the reader understands that the book has been her testimony all along — that the people Denise kept were, in fact, keeping her.

Manuscript complete — seeking representation