Download or read book A Memoir of Grief Continued written by Jennifer Weiner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A haunting, original eStory from Jennifer Weiner. When Eleanor Goode meets Gerald King, she's a senior at Wellesley who's won all the writing prizes. He's just published his first novel, Dirty Blond, and is well on his way to becoming one of the literary lions of his day. Gerry seduces Ellie, spinning her a fantasy of working with him, two writers, side by side. How could she have known that, in their years together, it would be one typewriter, not two; his words, not hers? How she would become the fetcher of coffee, the holder of trinkets fans would press into his hands after readings, the keeper of his legacy. A Memoir of Grief (Continued) begins with Gerald’s death. Ellie, who hasn't written more than a grocery list in decades of marriage, had no intention of writing a memoir. It's not until she realizes how broke he left her that she decides to write a whitewashed account of her life with the Great Man of Letters. Widow's Walk spends over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Critics hail Ellie's talent, the revelatory way she writes about grief, and how to live through it. Ellie enjoys the attention, but happily thinks that'll be the end of her literary career—until her agent starts asking about another book…

Download or read book Still written by Emma Hansen and published by Greystone Books Ltd. This book was released on 2020-04-04 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Still is one of those rare books that catches you up and does not let you go. With grace, courage, and honesty, Emma Hansen adds an important voice to this tragic and too-often silenced subject. I loved this book.” —Beth Powning, author of Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss A moving, candid account of one woman’s experience with stillbirth. Emma Hansen is 39 weeks and 6 days pregnant when she feels her baby go quiet inside of her. At the hospital, her worst fears are confirmed: doctors explain that her baby has died, and she will need to deliver him, still. Hansen gives birth to her son, Reid, amidst an avalanche of grief. Nine days later, she publishes a candid essay on her website sharing photos from the delivery room. Much to her surprise, her essay goes viral, sparking positive reactions around the world. Still shares what comes next: a struggle with grief and confusion alongside a desire to better understand stillbirth, which is experienced by more than two million women annually, but rarely talked about in public. At once honest, brave, and uplifting, Still is about one woman’s search for her own definition of motherhood, even as she faces one of life’s greatest challenges: learning to live after loss.

Download or read book Good Grief Embracing life at a time of death written by Catherine Mayer and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘The most life-affirming book ever written about death.’ Sandi Toksvig ‘One of the most powerful and helpful books about grief that you will ever read.’ Anita Anand ‘Grief is more than the price of love. It is love. We must learn not just to live with it, but to make it welcome.’

Download or read book The Way Through the Woods written by Litt Woon Long and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A grieving widow discovers a most unexpected form of healing—hunting for mushrooms. “Moving . . . Long tells the story of finding hope after despair lightly and artfully, with self-effacement and so much gentle good nature.”—The New York Times Long Litt Woon met Eiolf a month after arriving in Norway from Malaysia as an exchange student. They fell in love, married, and settled into domestic bliss. Then Eiolf’s unexpected death at fifty-four left Woon struggling to imagine a life without the man who had been her partner and anchor for thirty-two years. Adrift in grief, she signed up for a beginner’s course on mushrooming—a course the two of them had planned to take together—and found, to her surprise, that the pursuit of mushrooms rekindled her zest for life. The Way Through the Woods tells the story of parallel journeys: an inner one, through the landscape of mourning, and an outer one, into the fascinating realm of mushrooms—resilient, adaptable, and essential to nature’s cycle of death and rebirth. From idyllic Norwegian forests and urban flower beds to the sandy beaches of Corsica and New York’s Central Park, Woon uncovers an abundance of surprises often hidden in plain sight: salmon-pink Bloody Milk Caps, which ooze red liquid when cut; delectable morels, prized for their earthy yet delicate flavor; and bioluminescent mushrooms that light up the forest at night. Along the way, she discovers the warm fellowship of other mushroom obsessives, and finds that giving her full attention to the natural world transforms her, opening a way for her to survive Eiolf’s death, to see herself anew, and to reengage with life. Praise for The Way Through the Woods “In her search for new meaning in life after the death of her husband, Long Litt Woon undertook the study of mushrooms. What she found in the woods, and expresses with such tender joy in this heartfelt memoir, was nothing less than salvation.”—Eugenia Bone, author of Mycophilia and Microbia

Download or read book The Heart and Other Monsters written by Rose Andersen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Impossible to put down. It haunts me still.” -Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir A riveting, deeply personal exploration of the opioid crisis-an empathic memoir infused with hints of true crime. In November 2013, Rose Andersen's younger sister Sarah died of an overdose in the bathroom of her boyfriend's home in a small town with one of the highest rates of opioid use in the state. Like too many of her generation, she had become addicted to heroin. Sarah was 24 years old. To imagine her way into Sarah's life, Rose revisits their volatile childhood, marked by their stepfather's omnipresent rage and their father's pathological lying. As the dysfunction comes into focus, so does a broader picture of the opioid crisis and the drug rehabilitation industry in small towns across America. And when Rose learns from the coroner that Sarah's cause of death was a methamphetamine overdose, the story takes a wildly unexpected turn. As Andersen sifts through her sister's last days, we come to recognize the contours of grief and its aftermath: the psychic shattering which can turn to anger, the pursuit of an ever-elusive verdict, and the intensely personal rites of imagination and art needed to actually move on. Reminiscent of Alex Marzano-Lesnevich's The Fact of a Body, Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder, and Lacy M. Johnson's The Other Side, Andersen's debut is a potent, profoundly original journey into and out of loss.

Download or read book Grief Life written by Diana Register and published by . This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a true storyIt happened out of nowhere.Diana and her high school sweetheart Chad were living an ideal life. They were raising kids, working in public service, travelling and watching their daughter compete in gymnastics. When everything just changed.Soon, they found themselves embarking on an eighteen-month battle to save Chad's life after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer at only forty-four. Full of hope, they travelled the country searching for treatments and begging some of the best doctors in the world for help. They never gave up but the monstrous cancer beat them anyway. After Chad died, Diana set out to bring awareness to the disease but found that her raw, no-holds-barred comments about grief were what people resonated with most. In her advocacy, she soon learned that it wasn't just death people were grieving and that everybody is living a "Grief Life" in some way. Chad was Diana's "person": Her confidante. Her best friend. The keeper of her stories. The vault for her memories. The man whom she loved, admired, respected and appreciated the most. The man she never thought she would have to live without. It is her hope that if you can see that she can survive her loss, that you will be able to survive yours too.It happens out of nowhere.And everything changes.

Download or read book Planet Claire Suite for Cello and Sad Eyed Lovers written by Jeff Porter and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second installment in Ann Hood’s Gracie Belle imprint challenges the traditional solemnity that characterizes nonfiction books of grief, loss, and sorrow. “Few readers will fail to be gripped by this tragically common story about death and what comes after for those left behind . . . A haunting and thought-provoking consideration of death and ‘how utterly it rips apart our lives.'” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review Planet Claire is the story of the untimely death of the author’s wife and his candid account of the following year of madness and grief. As his life unravels, Porter analyzes his sadness with growing interest. He talks to Claire as if to evoke a presence, to mark a space for memory. He reports on his daily walks and shares observations of life’s sadness, while reminiscing about various moments in their life together. Like Orpheus, the author searches for a lost love, and what he finds is not the dog of doom but flashes of an intimate symmetry that brighten the darkest places of sorrow. The second title from Ann Hood’s Gracie Belle imprint, Planet Claire takes readers on a journey of sorrow that recalls memorable works by C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed), Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking), and Julian Barnes (Levels of Life). Porter’s memoir, however, is also playful, quirky, and self-ironic in a way that challenges the genre’s traditional solemnity. Like the novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, this is an unpredictably funny account of heartbreak, as if to say there’s something about the magnitude of loss that troubles even earnestness.

Download or read book Swimming with Maya written by Eleanor Vincent and published by Capital Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I really do not know how to greet this man, so I simply extend my hand. He takes it and then pulls me into an embrace that lasts several long moments. As my head rests against his jacket I find myself weeping, and through that sound, I hear the steady beat of Maya's heart in his chest," writes Eleanor Vincent in this moving story about love, loss, and renewal. Maya, Eleanor's elder daughter, was a high-spirited and gifted young woman. At age nineteen, she mounted a horse bareback on a dare, and in a crushing cantilever fall, was left in a coma from which she never recovered. Eleanor's life was turned upside down as she struggled to make the painful decision about Maya's fate. Ultimately, Eleanor chose to donate Maya's organs. Maya's heart was given to a man with a young family who needed a new heart to live. As time went by, Eleanor contacted and struck up a friendship with the heart recipient family. Swimming with Maya is about the unique and complicated relationship between mothers and daughters. It also explores how through organ donation, a relationship can continue to exist beyond the grave, changing many lives. In vivid language, Eleanor Vincent illuminates how courage, radical generosity, and letting go can heal a devastating loss. Book jacket.

Download or read book Aurelia Aur lia written by Kathryn Davis and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eerily dreamlike memoir, and the first work of nonfiction by one of our most inventive novelists. Aurelia, Aurélia begins on a boat. The author, sixteen years old, is traveling to Europe at an age when one can “try on personae like dresses.” She has the confidence of a teenager cultivating her earliest obsessions—Woolf, Durrell, Bergman—sure of her maturity, sure of the life that awaits her. Soon she finds herself in a Greece far drearier than the Greece of fantasy, “climbing up and down the steep paths every morning with the real old women, looking for kindling.” Kathryn Davis’s hypnotic new book is a meditation on the way imagination shapes life, and how life, as it moves forward, shapes imagination. At its center is the death of her husband, Eric. The book unfolds as a study of their marriage, its deep joys and stinging frustrations; it is also a book about time, the inexorable events that determine beginnings and endings. The preoccupations that mark Davis’s fiction are recognizable here—fateful voyages, an intense sense of place, the unexpected union of the magical and the real—but the vehicle itself is utterly new. Aurelia, Aurélia explodes the conventional bounds of memoir. It is an astonishing accomplishment.

Download or read book Lost Found written by Kathryn Schulz and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A “profound and beautiful” (Marilynne Robinson) account of joy and sorrow from one of the great writers of our time, The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • “I will stake my reputation on you being blown away by Lost & Found.”—Anne Lamott, author of Dusk, Night, Dawn and Bird by Bird One spring morning, Kathryn Schulz went to lunch with a stranger and fell in love. Having spent years looking for the right relationship, she was dazzled by how swiftly everything changed when she finally met her future wife. But as the two of them began building a life together, Schulz’s beloved father—a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee—went into the hospital with a minor heart condition and never came out. Newly in love yet also newly bereft, Schulz was left contending simultaneously with wild joy and terrible grief. Those twin experiences form the heart of Lost & Found, a profound meditation on the families that make us and the families we make. But Schulz’s book also explores how disappearance and discovery shape us all. On average, we each lose two hundred thousand objects over our lifetime, and Schulz brilliantly illuminates the relationship between those everyday losses and our most devastating ones. Likewise, she explores the importance of seeking, whether for ancient ruins or new ideas, friends, faith, meaning, or love. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to sustaining wonder and gratitude even in the face of loss and grief. A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, and humor about the connections between joy and sorrow—and between us all.

Download or read book My Wynter Season written by Jonathan Pitts and published by Harvest House Publishers. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seasons come and go, but Wynter seemed to leave too soon. When Jonathan Pitts took his wife of 15 years into his arms for their anniversary dance, he had no idea that within a month he would be on a completely different journey, navigating life after Wynter's sudden death at the age of 38. One moment he was married to a successful author and magazine publisher, and putting the finishing touches on their book about marriage. The next he was a widower and a single father of four grieving daughters. Without warning, the future his family had planned together dissolved, leaving Jonathan trying to answer the question that echoed through his daughters’ hearts and his own: How could a loving God allow this unspeakable loss? My Wynter Season is Jonathan’s story of losing the most wonderful gift he had ever been given and his journey toward understanding life without her. Yet in the wilderness of his grief, Jonathan found himself surrounded by God’s extravagant love, and came to truly understand Christ’s life-giving promise that death is not the end.

Download or read book The Narrow Door written by Paul Lisicky and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Narrow Door, Paul Lisicky creates a compelling collage of scenes and images drawn from two long-term relationships, one with a woman novelist and the other with his ex-husband, a poet. The contours of these relationships shift constantly. Denise and Paul, stretched by the demands of their writing lives, drift apart, and Paul's romance begins to falter. And the world around them is frail: environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, and local disturbances make an unsettling backdrop to the pressing concerns of Denise's cancer diagnosis and Paul's impending breakup. Lisicky's compassionate heart and resilience seem all the stronger in the face of such searing losses. His survival--hard-won, unsentimental, authentic--proves that in turning toward loss, we embrace life.

Download or read book Unsolaced written by Gretel Ehrlich and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the enduring classic The Solace of Open Spaces, here is a wondrous meditation on how water, light, wind, mountain, bird, and horse have shaped her life and her understanding of a world besieged by a climate crisis. Amid species extinctions and disintegrating ice sheets, this stunning collection of memories, observations, and narratives is acute and lyrical, Whitmanesque in breadth, and as elegant as a Japanese teahouse. “Sentience and sunderance,” Ehrlich writes. “How we know what we know, who teaches us, how easy it is to lose it all.” As if to stave off impending loss, she embarks on strenuous adventures to Greenland, Africa, Kosovo, Japan, and an uninhabited Alaskan island, always returning to her simple Wyoming cabin at the foot of the mountains and the trail that leads into the heart of them.

Download or read book When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back written by Naja Marie Aidt and published by . This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Extraordinary. It is about death, but I can think of few books which have such life. It shows us what love is.' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny 'There is no one quite like Naja Marie Aidt' Valeria Luiselli 'Devastating, angry, challenging, fragmented and filled with the beautiful hope that the love we have for people continues into the world even after they're gone.' Culturefly 'Fragmented, poetic, informative and truthful, Aidt faces the greatest loss we can ever know with all the force of great elegy writers like Anne Carson and Denise Riley. Essential.' Polly Clark, author of Larchfield and Tiger _______ "I raise my glass to my eldest son. His pregnant wife and daughter are sleeping above us. Outside, the March evening is cold and clear. 'To life!' I say as the glasses clink with a delicate and pleasing sound. My mother says something to the dog. Then the phone rings. We don't answer it. Who could be calling so late on a Saturday evening?" In March 2015, Naja Marie Aidt's 25-year-old son, Carl, died in a tragic accident. When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back is about losing a child. It is about formulating a vocabulary to express the deepest kind of pain. And it's about finding a way to write about a reality invaded by grief, lessened by loss. Faced with the sudden emptiness of language, Naja finds solace in the anguish of Joan Didion, Nick Cave, C.S. Lewis, Mallarmé, Plato and other writers who have suffered the deadening impact of loss. Their torment suffuses with her own as Naja wrestles with words and contests their capacity to speak for the depths of her sorrow. This palimpsest of mourning enables Naja to turn over the pathetic, precious transience of existence and articulates her greatest fear: to forget. The insistent compulsion to reconstruct the harrowing aftermath of Carl's death keeps him painfully present, while fragmented memories, journal entries and poetry inch her closer to piecing Carl's life together. Intensely moving and quietly devastating, this is what is it to be a family, what it is to love and lose, and what it is to treasure life in spite of death's indomitable resolve.

Download or read book Comfort A Journey Through Grief written by Ann Hood and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-05-04 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Rarely do memoirs of grief combine anguish, love, and fury with such elegance.” — Entertainment Weekly In 2002, Ann Hood’s five-year-old daughter Grace died suddenly from a virulent form of strep throat. Stunned and devastated, the family searched for comfort in a time when none seemed possible. Hood—an accomplished novelist—was unable to read or write. She could only reflect on her lost daughter—“the way she looked splashing in the bathtub ... the way we sang ‘Eight Days a Week.’” One day, a friend suggested she learn to knit. Knitting soothed her and gave her something to do. Eventually, she began to read and write again. A semblance of normalcy returned, but grief, in ever new and different forms, still held the family. What they could not know was that comfort would come, and in surprising ways. Hood traces her descent into grief and reveals how she found comfort and hope again—a journey to recovery that culminates with a newly adopted daughter.

Download or read book The Widower s Notebook written by Jonathan Santlofer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written with unexpected humor and great warmth, The Widower's Notebook is a portrait of a marriage, an account of the complexities of finding oneself single again after losing your spouse, and a story of the enduring power of familial love. "This is deeply moving ... beautifully written and modulated, with a dollop of droll, black humor. It is such an achievement, like running uphill against a strong wind."--Joyce Carol Oates On a summer day in New York Jonathan Santlofer discovers his wife, Joy, gasping for breath on their living room couch. After a frenzied 911 call, an ambulance race across Manhattan, and hours pacing in a hospital waiting room, a doctor finally delivers the fateful news. Consumed by grief, Jonathan desperately tries to pursue life as he always had--writing, social engagements, and working on his art--but finds it nearly impossible to admit his deep feelings of loss to anyone, not even his to beloved daughter, Doria, or to himself. As Jonathan grieves and heals, he tries to unravel what happened to Joy, a journey that will take him nearly two years.

Download or read book Goodbye Pet See You in Heaven written by Bel Mooney and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When her beloved small dog died, Bel Mooney was astonished at the depth of her ongoing sorrow. Sharing her loss online and in a newspaper article brought a deluge of responses, spurring Bel to explore these feelings further. Why do humans mourn pets? Can animals themselves grieve - and do they have souls? In Goodbye, Pet & See You in Heaven, Bel sets off on an emotional journey to learn more about pet bereavement. She is astounded by inexplicable 'signs' of her dog's spirit, watches Bonnie's ashes being turned into glass, talks to experts and discusses the mysterious enduring energy of love. She discovers why Ancient Egyptians mummified animals and what different faiths, myths, writers and scientists have to say about animals and the afterlife. She also looks back over her own life and reflects on lessons learned from companion animals - and from wildlife too. As informative as it is deeply moving, Goodbye, Pet is an intensely personal, uplifting look at the love we share with pets, both in life and afterwards. Enriched by heartfelt stories and inspirational words, it is a book to be treasured by anyone who has ever loved an animal.