From campfires to catharsis: The Strongest Girl in the World explores love, loss, and resilience at the Edinburgh Fringe
At this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, The Strongest Girl in the World offers a deeply personal yet universal exploration of grief, love, and memory. Writer-performer Truly Siskind-Weiss draws on the loss of her father in childhood and her grandfather later in life, weaving together campfire songs, stories, and humour to reflect on how we carry those we’ve lost. Both tender and darkly comic, the show transforms private mourning into a shared experience of resilience and connection.
My name is Truly Siskind-Weiss, and when I was 10 years old, my father died of stage 4 kidney cancer. I’m 28 now, and I’m okay…mostly.
These are the lines that begin the Epilogue of my autobiographical one-woman show, The Strongest Girl in the World. And, they’re true…mostly. When I was first writing the play, I got a lot of feedback about the show’s original ending. Chiefly, that it didn’t wrap up neatly. “Of course it doesn’t,” I thought, “because, it’s about real life, and real loss.”
Here’s the thing. It’s been 18 years since my dad died, and I’m still grieving. For me, experiencing loss at a young age has meant that my grief is ongoing and always changing. I understood loss differently at 10 than I did at 13, 17, and now 28. With each phase, I miss something else that I hadn’t anticipated.
At 13, I had my batmizvah: my first major milestone without my dad. To me, it was normal that my dad wasn’t there. Losing him at 10, I had never even had the chance to imagine life’s major moments with my dad in them. But, when the day came, I felt so aware of the sadness that the adults around me were experiencing. It made me feel guilty for just wanting to have a fun, celebratory time.
At 17, when I was deciding where to go to college, it struck me that I needed advice from someone who I couldn’t ask. And, I struggled with the realization that I was now entering a phase of my life that my dad would never know about. At 10, it was a fair assumption that I would stay at the same school through the 12th grade. But now, I was stepping beyond the world in which he had known me. It felt like I was leaving him behind somehow.
Now, at 28, I am mourning the fact that my dad will never meet my partner Frank. People have often talked about my dad not being at my wedding; not walking me down the aisle. And that specific loss never particularly bothered me. Like that 13 year old bat mitzvah girl, I never imagined my wedding with my dad there. And, as a staunch feminist, I figured, who needs a man to walk me down the aisle and ‘give me away?’ But, what I wasn’t prepared for was the sadness in recognizing that the person I love will never get to know my dad.
I wrote The Strongest Girl in the World as a way to artistically process this experience, of dealing with grief as it morphs and shifts. Grief seems to always hit me unexpectedly. So, exiting the show on our opening day at the Edinburgh Fringe, and looking down at my phone to see a message from my mom that read “call me when you can,” I felt that familiar pit in my stomach.
On the opening day of my one woman show about the death of my father, his father died. And just like that, the whole project changed. In my elevator pitch for The Strongest Girl in the World, I often say that it’s a show about loss, or coming of age, or summer camp. But, it’s really, at its core, a play about memory; what we do to keep peoples’ memories alive, how we carry them with us.
In losing another link to my dad, this whole narrative changes. And, in many ways, makes the act of retelling so much more important. And that’s exactly why the play can’t end neatly. The story keeps changing. I began writing this play 6 years ago, at a completely different time in my life. And, as I grow, it grows and changes. Because, loss grows and changes. So ultimately, I end the play not definitively with a period, but rather with an ellipsis. The story is never really finished…
The Strongest Girl in the World is on at 14:20 at Gilded Balloon Patter House (The Snug), until Monday, August 25 (not 12th, 19th). Book tickets at:
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