Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

Max Porter

‘Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.’

Max Porter’s extraordinary 2015 debut, full of unexpected humour, marked the arrival of a thrilling and significant talent on the literary scene. His unconventional and poetic exploration of death and its impact is by turns heart-wrenching and humorous, wrestling with the difficulty of writing about loss through its experimental and poetic style.

In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother’s sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.

In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow – antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him.

The Year of Magical Thinking 

Joan Didion

Joan Didion’s classic work recounts her experiences of grief after the deaths of her daughter and husband in quick succession. A powerful, unfiltered snapshot of the moments immediately after death and the months that follow a loss, Didion called the book an:

‘attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself’.

The Year of Magical Thinking is devastating and can be uncomfortable to read, taking the reader as close as it is possible to get to Didion’s mental state as she processes her grief.

Crying in H Mart

Michelle Zauner

Michelle Zauner’s 2021 memoir about the death of her mother from pancreatic cancer explores the way food can connect us to those we have lost. In this moving memoir of growing up mixed-race, Zauner explores how her mother’s death forced a reckoning with her own identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language and history her mother had given her. Her vivid descriptions of the food her mother loved connect Zauner to both her grief and her love for her mother.

‘It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.’

Michael Rosen’s Sad Book

Michael Rosen

Michael Rosen’s heartbreaking picture book chronicles his grief after the sudden death of his teenage son, Eddie. While published as a children’s book, its incredible honesty and straightforwardness about what it means to be sad offers something meaningful for adults too. A moving combination of sincerity and simplicity, it acknowledges that sadness is not always avoidable or reasonable and perfects the art of making complicated feelings plain.

‘Sometimes sad is very big. It’s everywhere. All over me. Then I look like this. And there’s nothing I can do about it.’

A Grief Observed

C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis’s intimate journal chronicling his experience of grief after his wife’s death has consoled readers for over half a century.

‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.’

Originally published under a pseudonym, this intensely personal book follows Lewis as he grapples with a crisis of religious faith – navigating hope, rage, despair and love – but eventually regains his bearings, finding his way back to life.

‘Here, sorrow and despair, the tiredness and numbness and petulance and nightmarishness of grief, all have their full, uncontrolled, experienced force … [Such] radical openness … Brilliant.’
Francis Spufford

The Reactor

Nick Blackburn

As a therapist, Nick Blackburn was used to talking to his patients about their emotions. But in the aftermath of the sudden death of his father, he found himself on a singular, labyrinthine journey to understand his loss. In a series of short fragmentary pieces, The Reactor sees Blackburn turn to philosophy, music, fashion, psychology, art and film, to YouTube videos of the Chernobyl disaster and to the music of Joni Mitchell. Through these series of connections, Blackburn aims to evoke and process the psychological process of grief and the ways in which something so personal can feel universal.

In the Guardian, Alex Clark wrote:

‘And while it confirms the isolated, individual nature of grief and can hardly be thought of as a work of consolation, it also suggests that the attempt to tell one’s story, and the attempt to listen, is not to be underrated.’

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore’s first novel in fourteen years follows Finn, a middle-aged history teacher, on a very unusual road trip. High up in a New York City hospice, Finn sits with his beloved brother Max, who is slipping from one world into the next. But when a phone call summons Finn back to a troubled old flame, a strange journey begins, opening a trapdoor in reality.

The two interwoven narratives of the book, Finn’s journey and a mysterious nineteenth-century journal, deal with grief and rebirth, the bond between siblings and the intimacy of lovers, the things that die with us and the things that live on.