When a mother is confronted with the self-chosen death of her 22-year-old son, she can only do one thing to remain upright: find words for the unspeakable. She searches in what he has left behind, in what she herself has kept and in what others – the family, friends, but also writers, poets and thinkers – offer her. In this way she tries to get a grip on what has happened.

With only fragments in her hands, she is only able to write in in that very same way. Involuntarily, a sharp light is shed on memories, experiences, dreams, thoughts and quotes. Using the Japanese repair technique kintsugi (‘golden connection’), a new whole gradually emerges in which the fault lines are allowed to remain just as visible as the shards.

Spicy is more than a mourning memoir, more universal than the story of a mother and a son. It is a story about love and letting go, about questions and impossible answers, about the value of a human life and ultimately about resilience and the cycle of existence.