The Person You Were Before
One of the least examined aspects of grief in fiction is what happens to identity in the immediate, shattering devastation of fresh loss, but in the long, grey, functional phase that follows. The phase in which a person gets up, goes to work, maintains relationships, and appears, from every external vantage point, to have adapted to the loss and moved on. This phase is the one Morello is most interested in, and the one he renders with the most precision. Upside Down is a novella about what grief becomes after years of being carefully not felt.
The “upsider”, the surface self that continues operating above while the fractured self exists below is Morello’s most psychologically invention. The upsider is not fake. This is crucial. They genuinely love the people they love. They have real thoughts and real responses to the world. But they operate with a layer of suppression so total that it has become indistinguishable from personality. The upsider has learned, through years of practice, to redirect, to deflect, to manage every situation in which genuine feeling might surface. They are extraordinarily good at being fine. And they do not know, or will not acknowledge, that being fine is a different thing from being whole.
Caleb’s surface self is drawn with the specific texture of a person who has built their identity substantially around being the one who holds things together. He is the person others lean on. He is reliable, caring, present in the way that people who have learned to suppress their own pain often are. They become very good at attending to others precisely because it keeps them from having to attend to themselves. This pattern is never stated in the book. It is demonstrated through the accumulation of small moments: the way he absorbs Maddy’s withdrawal without fully examining his own role in it; the way he speaks about Shelly in the careful, managed vocabulary of someone who has practiced discussing a difficult subject until the practice itself became a form of suppression.
What the upside down restores, what the fractured self still has that the upsider has lost, is access to the unmanaged feeling beneath the management. This is not sentimentality. The feeling in the upside down is not soft or comforting. It is raw in the way that unprocessed grief is raw: jagged, circular, frequently irrational, attached to details that seem disproportionate to their actual significance. The pigeon, a bird Caleb failed to save years before Shelly’s death, carries a weight in the upside down that seems, on the surface, absurd. But this is precisely how unprocessed grief operates: it attaches to the proximate wound, the rehearsal wound, the small failure that became the template for the larger one. The pigeon is not about the pigeon. In the upside down, that is simply visible.
Morello’s argument about identity and grief, running beneath the surface of his book’s plot, is one of the most honest in contemporary fiction. Suppression is not healing. The person who has learned to function perfectly around a wound is not a healed person. They are a person at considerable remove from themselves, carrying the weight of that remove as a kind of chronic low grade exhaustion that they have named, over time, personality. The upside down makes this visible. And making it visible is the first, most frightening, most necessary step toward the possibility of its end.
