It’s a hot Saturday morning in August, and in the basement of a small, unassuming country church in Alpharetta, you can just hear a hum of conversation from the propped exterior door. Inside, scattered balloons, festive decorations, and an upbeat atmosphere scream “Celebration.”
The bell of the ball is a winsome young woman with boundless energy and affection, her expressive face lighting up as new guests enter the room. As vivacious as she is, she is in no hurry. Everyone is there for her. It’s a party to celebrate a milestone she has dreamed of since childhood: the release of her first book. Given the jovial mood, you would never know the book itself is a chronicle of the darkest time in this young author’s life.
Madison Garrett Kulp knew she wanted to be a writer from a young age, and her father, Dr. Michael Garrett, encouraged her passion wholeheartedly. When a third grade Kulp brought home an essay about a pet orangutan, her father helped her transform it into a multi-chapter book, complete with an array of characters and family memories.
Kulp shared a love for Disney with her father, who was particularly enthralled by the imagineering behind the Disney parks. So, picture their collective excitement when Kulp was accepted into the Disney College Program after her junior year at the University of Georgia.
As she blissfully park-hopped in Orlando during the first week of her dream job, she had no idea the “Happiest Place on Earth” would become the backdrop to, not a fairytale semester, but the first heartbreaking chapters of her father’s battle with terminal brain cancer.
“I didn't really know how to be in a happy place and also be heartbroken,” says Kulp. “So I started writing about it. I would write in Magic Kingdom, on Tom Sawyer’s Island, or in the coffee shops in the resorts. And I would funnel those into some blog posts I would publish for my community.”
While she decided to stay at Disney despite her father’s diagnosis, she went home a month early so she could spend Christmas with her family. A year later, in late 2017, Dr. Garrett passed away soon after his 54th birthday.
Kulp discontinued her blog but kept chronicling her experiences with grief over the next two years, for her own sake. Now, she has consolidated all those blogs and journals into her memoir, The Happiest Place to Cry.
“I think I always knew I was writing towards a completed narrative, but I didn't really know what that was going to look like,” the author says. “[I initially] called it ‘Tell Me A Tale of Redemption,’ because I didn't know what to call it. I didn't want to call it a book. I thought, ‘I want to write towards redemption.’ And so that's what I did.”
Unlike many grief memoirs, there is an immediacy in Kulp’s book. It finds her, not 20 years down the road with many lessons learned from years of living with the pain of losing her father, but right at the beginning.
“There's a part of the book where it's four blank pages that just says, ‘What do I do?’ because that's the paralysis I was feeling,” she says. This moment in the book is modeled after a journal entry written two days after her dad’s passing, as she attempted to write his eulogy. “I wanted it to be as reflective of an actual grief experience as possible. And that is messy and not pretty and stagnant and not complete sentences.”
The Roswell writer fleshed out the story in her spare time for two years, writing in local hot spots such as Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee, Summit Coffee, and the Roswell Library. Along the way, she made a point to celebrate the process, not just the big milestones.
“One of my favorite musical artists talked about how people don't just pour a glass of scotch for a well-written sentence anymore,” says Kulp. “You wait for the big moments to celebrate. And so I had that thought in my head the whole time I was writing, ‘I didn't write 900 words today, but I wrote one sentence that I'm really proud of. Let's go get a Coke Icee and celebrate the fact that I’m proud of that one thing.’”
With the holiday season at hand, Kulp plans to eat apple pie in her father’s honor.
“My dad's birthday almost always falls on Thanksgiving weekend,” she says. “It is a moment of grief, it's a moment of joy, and it's a moment of remembering how much my dad loved Christmas. And all of that is tied into Thanksgiving weekend for me. So, even if it's just me in my house, I will be having an apple pie on his birthday every year.”
Sally Fuller is a theater nerd published on BroadwayWorld.com, Encore Atlanta, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. When not writing, she works at her dream job as a mother.
It’s available online everywhere books are sold, but also at
The Reading Attic in Marietta and Tall Tale in Decatur.
PULL QUOTE: “I wanted it to be as reflective of an actual grief experience as possible. And that is messy and not pretty…