Six Essential Books About Grief and Recovery

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6 books

Most of us don’t think about reading books about grief – until suddenly we need to, urgently. In 2020, distraught and utterly disoriented after my 25-year-old son collapsed and died, I turned to books for help. And it was one of the best things I did because reading the works of others searching for meaning gave me life-saving insights into how to emerge from the desperate loneliness of deep grief into a wider, gentler, and more generous world. Eventually, the cumulative experience gave me the will and the courage to write my own grief memoir, Your Wild and Precious Life: on grief, hope and rebellion, which explores how the death of a loved one can be as transformative as it is devastating.

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The Iceberg

Marion Coutts, 2016

Coutt’s incandescent account of her husband’s agonizing battle with a brain tumour is at the very top of my list of grief memoirs. Not only because it’s the most beautifully written, but because it focuses on an aspect of grief that everyone who loves a person who is fatally ill or set on a self-destructive path knows all too well. Coutt’s achingly honest evocation of anticipatory grief is forensic in its descriptions of the sheer messiness of the domestic life of two artists struggling with what is to come. But the precious beauty of their life together illuminates every page.

Finding Meaning

The Sixth Stage of Grief

David Kessler, 2019

This is one of those books I want to press into the hands of anybody who is undone by grief and fears they’ll never feel good again. It was only after the sudden, tragic death of his son that the psychologist David Kessler, one of the world’s leading experts on the grieving process, felt he really understood grief. Extrapolating from his work with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who developed the much-misinterpreted “five stages” theory, Kressler suggests a vital sixth stage that is a dimension of all its own: meaning. “Bad days don’t have to be your eternal destiny,” he writes. “That doesn’t mean your grief will get smaller over time. It means you must get bigger.” This wise, generous book helped me work out how.

The Red of My Blood

A Death and Life Story

Clover Stroud, 2023

When Clover Stroud’s older sister died of cancer at the age of 46, she had already lost her mother, who spent many years in a nursing home after a tragic accident that robbed her of speech, most movement, and memory itself. “The hot sparks of trauma mould you into a new shape,” Stroud writes. “Even now, in mid-life, I have some friends whose parents and siblings are alive and undamaged by accidents or the vertigo of loss, and sometimes I look at them and wonder: what does that feel like?” Stroud is unflinchingly honest in her descriptions of her sister’s slow and then fast decline and of the overwhelming sense of confusion and loss that came in its wake. But her story is scattered with jewel-like memories and vignettes of family joy, and it leaves you with a sense of wonder - and gratitude for all that life has to offer beyond the depths of pain.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow

Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

Francis Weller, 2015

When my son died, I was lucky to have close friends and family to help me through the worst. But I was also aware of the people who didn’t know how to react and who avoided me as though death itself was infectious. In his lush, lyrical work on sorrow in all its many incarnations, psychologist Frances Weller addresses this kind of avoidance head-on. Western cultures actively suppress pain, he argues. And this not only complicates the hard, necessary work of grief but damages our souls. I read this book in a state of turmoil, but it calmed me by pointing out simple, urgent truths like this: “grief is not a problem to be solved, not a condition to be medicated, but an essential experience of being human.”

The Awakened Brain

The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life

Lisa Miller, 2021

“Spirituality,” writes neuropsychologist Lisa Miller, “appears to protect against mental suffering.” And while her own neuro-imaging studies back this up, she is aware that a belief in the mystical cannot be forced but must be reached through an active choice. In this illuminating hybrid of scientific study and autobiography, she investigates the less-explored work of William James, the father of psychology, who believed that “we dip our roots into a common pool where minds communicate, by gleams and flashes.” And in going where materialist science hesitates to tread, she gently challenges other scientists to explore the beliefs that humans have carried in their blood since the time the first prayers were uttered.

Nonfiction

Julie Myerson, 2024

Nearly all the books that helped me through the worst months of my grief were non-fiction – so it feels appropriate that the only novel I’ve included in this list is called Nonfiction. As compulsively readable as all Myerson’s fiction and inspired by traumatic experiences in her own life, it snags your heart immediately by evoking a journey towards an existential cliff-edge. Narrated by a mother whose teenage daughter has left the family home under excruciating circumstances, it pulls no punches about the cruel helplessness of parenting a beloved, troubled child who is lost to addiction. But within the permanent, desperate ache of anticipatory grief, there are flashes of grace and humour, and the novel leaves you feeling there is a place of wonder beyond the last page, which the narrator will one day step into.