Influencer’s Husband Died 4 Months After They Became Parents (Exclusive)

Brielle Persun started out on what’s known as “Bookstagram” in 2020. As the name suggests, it’s the side of Instagram run by avid readers with plenty of recommendations to share, and Persun decided to join in on the fun after peeling through enough books during the COVID-19 lockdown.

She opened a second Instagram account to review reads and suggest titles to her followers, and before Persun knew it, she’d created a real community of fellow Bookstagram users.

With over 17,000 followers, her page @BookswithBrielle discusses a variety of genres. However, if she had to pin down one way to describe her reading habits, she says she’s most drawn to contemporary fiction, especially when written by women.

“I love books that make me feel something,” Persun, 36, tells PEOPLE. “If it’s going to make me cry, I want to read it.”

Shortly after she started on Bookstagram, the Charleston-based content creator met Tyler. A couple of years later, they married and on Aug. 26, 2024, she and Tyler welcomed their first baby. They named their son after his mom’s maiden name, Colby.

But her love story didn’t turn out to be something one would find in the pages of a romantic novel. As much as Persun can appreciate “a good romance every once in a while,” she says she actually never really bought into the “happily ever after” plotline.

“I can only really read so much before I’m like, ‘Okay, this is not realistic,'” she admits. “People have their own opinions. There are people who read them like, ‘Well, I want it to end happily, because that’s how I want to be.’ I’m just more of a realistic girly.”

Persun’s reality changed at 12:34 p.m. on Jan. 10, 2025, when Tyler died from complications of pancreatitis. They’d only been married a little over a year, with a son who wasn’t even 5 months old at the time, and suddenly her world came crashing down.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Persun grieved on the shoulders of her parents, Tyler’s parents and her circle of ever-supportive friends. Her loved ones helped with everything. They watched Colby while Persun was busy planning her husband’s funeral. They walked her dog. Her friends started a GoFundMe page for Persun and didn’t even tell her until it raised a decent amount of money.

“A good friend of mine — actually from Bookstagram — came to my house, and she told everybody in our [Bookstagram group chats] was just like, ‘I hope one day that if something ever happens to me that I have the friends that Brielle had,'” Persun recalls. “There was somebody taking care of everything that I just didn’t have the brain power to handle.”

If you search online for books to read while grieving, you’ll find self-help suggestions, reflective memoirs or stories that grapple with death and dying. Persun gravitated in the opposite direction. She picked up fantasy books.

“Some stuff is just too real,” she says. “I needed to [be] disassociated, is the best way to say it.”

The third installment of Rebecca Yarros’ Empyrean series, Onyx Storm, was released less than two weeks after Tyler’s death. Persun took to it for all the ways it didn’t mirror what was happening in her world, the real world.

“I was just so grateful that I had that book because I was just like, it’s a ‘romantasy.’ So it’s still got the romance side of it, but a lot of it’s just like you’re in a whole different world,” she explains. “Reading is something I loved and I still want to love it, and I want it to be able to also be a form of escapism.”

In her state of mourning, Persun’s perspective on grief broadened. She came to understand it doesn’t have to be something that clouds every quadrant of life.

“If you sit in your grief all day long non-stop and it’s all you’re consuming, you’re paralyzed,” says Person. “I don’t know how you do that. Especially when I have to raise a child, I can’t.”

She does lean into grief at times, but she’s also conscious of the fact that people “can be happy and sad at the same time in one day,” even after losing a loved one. She controls that fluctuation through reading, by picking up a fantasy book, thriller or cozy mystery.

Of course, as her personal tastes shifted, so too did Persun’s Instagram content. Having built her community from the ground up — and knowing her audience skews toward women her age, many of whom have kids too — she wanted to be realistic about her grief. She couldn’t just return to social media and keep recommending books as if nothing happened.

“I felt weird about it. I was like, ‘There has to be a way. I have to be able to also show my journey with what’s going on or else it’s just it’s inauthentic to me,'” she remembers. She also understood that some people who “don’t love you getting your sad all over them,” but she did hear from people that really did want to know her story, in part because it echoed their own.

Persun sees herself in a unique “age of widowhood,” being in her mid-thirties. She doesn’t think she’s likely to have another kid, since her pregnancy with Colby was “really rough,” and she says she “can’t even fathom dating right now.”

She realizes there may come a time when she opens herself up again, and she knows having another child isn’t completely off the table. But for the time being, she’s not in that headspace.

“It’s just a really weird and lonely place to be,” Persun shares. “The widows that are outspoken about their grief — that do a lot of self-help or writing books or things like that — are either young enough to kind of get married again, have kids with their new partner and kind of have this big blended family, or there are the widows that [lost] their husband of 30-plus years. Their children are older, some of them even have grandkids.”

She adds, “I was just kind of floundering because … there’s no one that felt very relatable. Which is where I kind of was like, ‘I think I need to start being that.’ Because maybe they are out there, and they just don’t know what to do either.”

Sharing openly on her Bookstagram page opened the door for those people to confide in Persun. She’s gotten messages from women sharing stories about losing their partners after one year of marriage or losing them during pregnancy.

It’s inspired Persun to strike a balance in her content between being honest and outspoken about grief “without being super depressing.” After all, she knows the importance of using books as a means of escapism.

The influencer isn’t closing herself off to the possibility of wanting to read into her grief someday. She’s been recommended books like Option B by Sheryl Sandberg with a provision: for “when you’re ready,” her friends said.

That’s where Persun’s perspective becomes so poignant. She’s not just curating a list of books based on what she knows about grief. She is consciously noting what helped — and continues to help — her through each stage of mourning Tyler.

“I think about the people who are going through what I went through, especially that week afterward,” Persun tells PEOPLE of her recommendation. “I’m not tailoring it to them; I’m considering them.”