Dandelion is Dead: About the Novel by Rosie Storey

Don’t let the title of my debut novel fool you. Dandelion is Dead is a story about life. Or, more precisely, it is a story about finding a way through the chaos of grief and towards life again. Discovering it afresh.

When the novel opens, Poppy has recently lost the most important person in her world: her older sister, Dandelion, and she is spiralling through a kind of numbness. Her grief is not only sadness, but distortion. It warps her judgement and enables her to do something wholly out of character and morally precarious: reply to a stranger’s message on Dandelion’s dating app and then, meet up with him when he asks her out on what would have been Dandelion’s fortieth birthday. To Poppy, it feels like a dare from her sister. A way to be close to her for a few more hours. Give Dandelion another evening of life.

I wanted to write about sisters whose personalities are as tangled as their love for one another. All their lives, Poppy and Dandelion have wound around each other like garden creepers, crawling up towards the light. They are very different women, but they have shaped each other completely. And so the story asks: what happens when they are forced apart? Who is Poppy when she is no longer in Dandelion’s shadow? I knew I could never give Poppy her sister back, but I wanted her to be surprised by life’s beauty once again, in a new way. And so, in Dandelion’s wake, Poppy finds Jake. Lust burns through her grief, allowing her to glimpse ‘a new place on the other side — a world she shouldn’t know.’

I have always loved writing about desire and dating. Dating apps are especially fascinating to me because they are built on imagination. We project what we want to see. We fall for versions of people before we really know them, and then, so often, must reckon with the gap between fantasy and reality. In this novel, I wanted to push that idea further. Dandelion’s dating app becomes the looking glass Poppy passes through. And so the man Poppy begins dating, Jake, falls for a figment. Is he dating Poppy? Or is he dating Dandelion?

The book is told from two perspectives, and I value Jake’s story just as much as I do the stories of the sisters. He is a forty-year-old divorced father, looking for love again and trying to understand himself. He is struggling with fatherhood, family, masculinity, and the question of whether good men do bad things. I wanted both Poppy and Jake to be flawed, funny, tender, and sometimes reckless. People who do the wrong thing for reasons that feel painfully human.

Poppy is not only looking for an escape from grief; she is also trying to escape the pressure she feels from society. She is in her late thirties and unmarried. She has a serious boyfriend, Sam, but she’s worried their love is not enough, but she is just as frightened of facing life alone as she is of facing it with him. And so moonlighting as Dandelion becomes a kind of liberation for Poppy. Dandelion was unencumbered by what other people thought of her. She was wild, fun, provocative, often difficult, and uninterested in behaving as she should. She felt no shame and, in that sense, she was free. For me, writing Dandelion was a liberating process too. I loved creating a woman who felt no shame, who was unapologetically true to herself, and sometimes brutal in her decisions.

When I began writing this story, I was acutely interested in personal authenticity: how hard it can be to find yourself, and your way through life. A few years earlier, I had left my corporate career and walked naively into the darkness, convinced I was about to become a novelist. Instead, I wrote nine drafts of a book that would never be published. By the time I started this novel, I was close to giving up writing altogether. But in the evenings, on weekends, and in snatched moments on the top deck of the bus into central London, this story began to come alive. Dandelion is Dead became my own looking glass to pass through.

Grief flows. It changes shape. I don’t believe it ever leaves us, nor should we want it to. We learn to dance with it, move with it and discover a new version of life and ourselves. And so it is in this story—on the other side of Poppy’s emotional obliteration, messy and dazzling, she might just find real love.