Some readers are drawn to horror, romance, or fantasy books; some opt for history or current events; others prefer graphic novels, poetry, or essays. While I primarily gravitate to literary fiction, I have a strong affinity for grief memoirs. Some might find this morbid. When I’ve considered it, I’ve concluded that I particularly enjoy these types of books for the same reason that Stormy Weather, sung by Billie Holiday, was one of my favorite songs when I was 10 years old: the artist’s raw emotions form an unflinchingly honest piece of art.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks’ “Memorial Days” opens with the phone call she receives on May 27, 2019, telling her that her husband, Tony Horwitz, has collapsed and died on a Washington, D.C. street. Three years later, she sets to the task of finally dealing with her grief, hunkering down on the remote Tasmanian Flinders Island. Moving back and forth in time and geography, “Memorial Days” will compel you to flip its pages, and then seek out the canon of books by both Horwitz and Brooks.
“The Light of the World” by Elizabeth Alexander is a study in incandescent prose. Alexander, a poet, writes about the loss of her late husband. It’s a heartbreakingly beautiful account of his sudden death and a portrait of their life together. She opens the book with,
…Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is felt in the absence of love. “The queen died and the king died’ is a plot, wrote E.M. Forester in “The Art of the Novel,” but “The queen died and then the king died of grief” is a story…
This is a story you won’t want to miss.
“A Three Dog Life” by Abigail Thomas is the story of how the author worked to build a new life after her husband was left with a life-changing brain injury after being hit by a car. It’s a story of fortitude, filled with the companionship of dogs and a no-nonsense approach to living a life.
…I was on a small island once, in the middle of a great big lake, mountains all over the place, and as I watched the floating dock the wind kicked up, the waves rose from nowhere, and I imagined myself lying there and the dock suddenly breaking loose, carried away by the storm. I wondered if I could lie still and enjoy the sensation of rocking, after all I wouldn’t be dead yet, I wouldn’t be drowning, just carried off somewhere that wasn’t part of my plan. The very thought of it gave me the shivers. Still, how great to be enjoying the ride, however uncertain the outcome. I’d like that. It’s what we’re all doing anyway, we just don’t know it…
On the verge of completing training as a neurosurgeon, thirty-six-year-old Paul Kalanithi is diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. “When Breath Becomes Air” is a stunningly beautiful account of facing one’s mortality, from the lens of someone regularly working to save other people’s lives. Published posthumously, the book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 68 weeks.
In “I Am, I Am, I Am,” author Maggie O’Farrell takes readers through 17 near-death experiences (16 of which are her own). The book is divided by sections titled with the body part made vulnerable in each instance. O’Farrell wrote it to help her daughter, who lives with a laundry list of life-threatening allergies, understand that she’s not alone. As a parent of an adult child who deals with similar, although fewer, allergies, this memoir hit home in a unique, affecting way.
Joan Didion (“The Year of Magical Thinking”) said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” In each of these books, it’s clear that the writer is doing the same. And, aren’t we all just trying to make sense of what has been lost?