When a mother is confronted with the self-chosen death of her 22-year-old son, she can only do one thing to remain standing: find words for the unspeakable. She searches through his legacy, what she has preserved, and what others—family, friends, but also writers, poets, and thinkers—offer her. In this way, she tries to grasp what happened.

With only fragments in her hands, she is only able to write fragmentarily. Involuntarily, a sharp light is shed on memories, experiences, dreams, thoughts, and quotations. Using the Japanese repair technique of kintsugi ("golden connection"), a new whole gradually emerges in which the fractures are allowed to remain as visible as the shards. kintsugi (‘gouden verbinding’) ontstaat gaandeweg een nieuw geheel waarin de breuklijnen net zo zichtbaar mogen blijven als de scherven.

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 circle of existence.