Sarah Ellis vividly remembers the day she learned the peculiar pleasure of grieving a literary death, even though it happened decades ago. She was reading Little Women at a friend’s cabin when she arrived at the chapter that’s been the undoing of generations of young girls: “The Valley of the Shadow,” where poor, patient Beth March finally gives up the ghost. Ellis, who was lying on her back on a chaise longue, cried so hard that the tears pooled in her ears.

“It was the most enjoyable cry ever,” says Ellis, with obvious relish.

It’s easy to find uncomplicated catharsis in the demise of a fictional character, but it’s a different kettle of fish when the death depicted on the page belongs to a real person, someone who lived and breathed within recent memory. This is one of the things that Ellis is grappling with when it comes to her new memoir, My Year in Fairyland: Grief, MAID and a Lifetime of Books (Stonehewer Books, June 1), which covers the 12 months before her wife Sherry’s medically assisted death.

“The major thing I worry about is that by writing about Sherry, I have somehow frozen her, and it’s just my relationship with her, my view of her, my knowledge of her,” says Ellis, who is best known for her award-winning children’s books. (Ellis has won the Governor General’s Award for English-Language Children’s Literature, the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, and two Mr. Christie’s Book Awards.) “I feel sort of an ethical question about taking somebody and turning her into a fictional character. … There are people who knew her longer than I did, and I’m sure they had their own views.”

Ellis might only be able to capture her version of her wife, but that version is a pleasure to meet. Sherry is funny, lively, and unpredictable, even as she’s increasingly disabled by multiple sclerosis. She’s also someone who unequivocally knows what she wants; from their earliest conversations, she’s upfront with Ellis about her plans to eventually access medical assistance in dying (MAID). As a “congenital optimist,” Ellis did, to a degree, hope that she could change Sherry’s mind by showing her how wonderful it was to live in a world with “the songs of Fats Waller and sex and risotto ai funghi,” though at the same time she strongly believed that to love someone was to allow them the autonomy to make choices that might pain you.

MAID became legal in Canada in 2016, though Sherry didn’t qualify due to one of the criteria at the time being that the person’s death must be “reasonably foreseeable.” Then, in 2018, Ellis read a “clear, detailed, and immensely loving” article by writer Lawrence Hill about his mother’s physician-assisted death in Switzerland, which inspired her and Sherry to submit an application to the same clinic. When it was approved a few months later and an appointment was scheduled for September of the following year, Ellis had to confront a destabilizing fact: unlike most people, she knew the exact date and time her loved one would die. With that, reality shifted, and she entered fairyland, a country where none of the rules governing the regular world seem to apply.

Ellis describes fairyland as a place suspended between who she had been before Sherry died and who she was after: “I saw this video about a photographer who goes around and takes pictures of abandoned shopping centres as liminal space. It’s kind of like that – there’s a weird leftover energy [because] they’re no longer fulfilling the purpose for which they were built, but unsure as to what they will become.”

Within that space, anything is possible, even joyful things. For example, Ellis and Sherry decided to have a wedding, though they were both somewhat skeptical of the institution of marriage, and built the ceremony around passages from two of their favourite works of literature: Edward Lear’s poem “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” and Russell Hoban’s children’s classic The Mouse and His Child. Like Lear’s protagonists, Ellis and Sherry ended their celebration dancing by the light of the moon.

But anyone familiar with fairy folklore knows that you can’t return from their country unmarked. For Ellis, two of the unexpected ways that grief changed her were a new propensity for crying over everything – good, bad, and in-between – and an inability to write. She began working on an adult novel, then, when that failed, she switched to short stories. She attempted to rewrite E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View from the perspective of the character of the adolescent Minnie Beebe, then thought she could put together an anthology of her own speeches, essays, and columns. None of it worked. “I would squeeze out a sentence and then immediately find it shamefully bad and delete it,” Ellis writes.

It was only at that point that she reluctantly tried her hand at memoir – though, as with matrimony, her attitude toward the genre is ambivalent. She feels “too private, too British, too whatever” for confessional writing, and the first draft of My Year in Fairyland included a fictional character commenting on her life, which a trusted friend rightfully called out as a way for Ellis to avoid “going into” herself. Then (one last gift from the fairies?) she hit upon the idea of using fairyland as a device, and things finally began to click.

The result is a book that’s both strange and gorgeous. Ellis weaves together her own experiences with literary passages. Books, she says, are part of her “mental furniture” – which makes sense, given that she’s been a literary critic (including for Quill & Quire) and librarian, as well as a writer – and it’s clear that she could as easily separate herself from them as you could unscramble an egg. There are fascinating forays into subjects such as the art of play, the truths held in rhymes and riddles, the (occasionally dark) charms of fairy stories, and advice about grief found in Homer’s Odyssey. It’s the sort of literary work whose pieces sound scattered and disparate in theory, but somehow they all work together in perfect harmony.

And at the centre of it all, of course, there’s Sherry – not living, exactly, but immortalized through Ellis’s love.