My mom handed me one of those little girl diaries with a lock and key when I was in third grade. I wrote my heart into those diaries until I needed more space and shifted to regular-sized notebooks. Writing is my way to know myself and make sense of my life. The journal I kept in the last months of my husband’s life helped me reassemble the trauma-blurred memories of his dying, and then, it supported my emotional rebirth during the year of intense grieving. It is with surprise and delight that I hear from readers who say I articulate their innermost emotions related to love and loss.
I wrote
Life with an Impossible Person: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Transformation
In their 50s, Raynor and Moth Winn suddenly lost their Welsh farm, home, and livelihood. Simultaneously, they were given Moth’s fatal diagnosis of a rare degenerative disease. Deeply in love for 32 years, this unconventional couple faced the loss of everything they’d loved together, including Moth’s life. While Raynor and Moth chose to walk the 630-mile West Coast Path in the south of England, my husband of 37 years and I traveled England and Europe in search of a place that spoke to the poetic longings of our souls. When my husband’s health also disintegrated, I needed the same resilience and courage I found in Raynor and Moth. Their uncommon commitment to ignore doctor’s advice in exchange for adhering to their beliefs was confirmation and support for me as I reviewed the unconventional decisions we made in Philip’s final years. The love that continues after death confirms the commitment of a lifetime.
"Polished, poignant... an inspiring story of true love."-Entertainment Weekly
A BEST BOOK OF 2019, NPR's Book Concierge SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BOOK AWARD OVER 400,000 COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE
The true story of a couple who lost everything and embarked on a transformative journey walking the South West Coast Path in England
Just days after Raynor Winn learns that Moth, her husband of thirty-two years, is terminally ill, their house and farm are taken away, along with their livelihood. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South…
As I entered the strange new territory of grief and a solitary life after 37 years of an unconventional marriage, I found myself looking for solace from authors who could show me the way forward. Martha Cooley’s retreat to a small, medieval Italian village brought the first tentative smiles to my early months of grieving. My husband and I shared a love of Europe and stayed in our own medieval village in Tuscany just a few years before he died. Cooley used her retreat to deal consciously but gently with the many deaths she’d faced over a traumatic ten years, as well as the impending death of her mother. Her reflections related to mortality and carrying on after the loss of loved ones were a comfort as I began to confront the uncomfortable challenge of stepping into a new life without my husband and best friend.
"[A] splendid and subtle memoir in essays" —The New York Times Book Review
Having lost eight friends in ten years, Cooley retreats to a tiny medieval village in Italy with her husband. There, in a rural paradise where bumblebees nest in the ancient cemetery and stray cats curl up on her bed, she examines a question both easily evaded and unavoidable: mortality. How do we grieve? How do we go on drinking our morning coffee, loving our life partners, stumbling through a world of such confusing, exquisite beauty?
Linking the essays is Cooley’s escalating understanding of another loss on the…
Unorthodox ways of living and loving appeal to me… in literature and in life. When I found Abigail Thomas in the year following my husband’s death, I felt I’d found a new friend. Thomas’s husband’s brain damage following an accident must have been a nightmare. Living for years with his rage and cognitive lapses must have taken every bit of her courage and resilience. When he died, Thomas was forced, as I was, to pick up and carry on with her life. Is there to be pleasure again? Or has this lifetime’s allotment of joy been used up? These were questions she and I shared. Thomas begins to find her way back via the little joys found with dogs, friends, and cooking (to name a few). Her humor and quirkiness blended with honesty helped me lift myself off the couch, and slowly, gently move forward into my new life.
The New York Times bestseller from the beloved author of A Three Dog Life-an exhilarating, superbly written memoir on friendship, family, creativity, tragedy, and the richness of life: "If you only read one book this year, make it this one" (Ann Patchett).
In her bestselling memoir A Three Dog Life, Abigail Thomas wrote about the devastating loss of her husband. In What Comes Next and How to Like It, "a keenly observed memoir...Thomas writes of the changes aging brings us all and of coping through love: of family, dogs, a well-turned phrase. She is superb company" (People).
Without Reservations gave me hope following the death of my beloved husband of 37 years. Living with his unique and nontraditional worldview, I’d grown into and inhabited a wider, less conventional way of being than my suburban middle-class upbringing had prepared me for. But once he was gone, what and who was I going to be? Steinbach’s travelogue goes to many of the places my husband and I traveled in England and Europe, and that brought reminiscences of great pleasure. But it was her inner journeying in search of her soul that gave me the courage to embark on the inner travels toward self-discovery and the independence I faced in a newly widowed existence.
American journalist Alice Steinbach took a year off to live in four cities - Paris, Venice, London and Oxford - when she realized she had entered a new phase of life. Her sons had graduated from college; she had been divorced for a long time; she was a successful journalist. While there was nothing really wrong with her life, she felt restless. Could she live independently of her family, her friends, her career? Steinbach searches for the answer to this provocative question firstly in Paris, where she finds a soul mate in a Japanese man; in Milan, where she befriends…
Even though the marriage in Oh William!ends in divorce while my marriage ended (without my consent) in my husband’s untimely death, the book brought me back to the unconventional nature of my marriage. Elizabeth Strout’s uncanny ability to say much in a single sentence had me traveling back in time and heart to the many moments that made our marriage. The tendernesses and fears, the deep trust and insecurities that quietly but forcefully bound us together made up the subtle mysteries of our uncommon relationship. What makes people move apart yet remain forever close, as in Lucy Barton and her ex-husband, William, or what holds two people together when there are many factors that might drive them apart, as in my marriage? These questions made reading this book a thought-provoking and enriching experience.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning, Booker-longlisted, bestselling author returns to her beloved heroine Lucy Barton in a luminous novel about love, loss, and the family secrets that can erupt and bewilder us at any point in life
Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband - and longtime, on-again-off-again friend and confidante. Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of…
A woman’s adventures, struggles, and abiding love for a most unorthodox man throughout a 37-year partnership. An idealist, romantic, and eccentric astrologer-poet, Heiman’s husband believed there were places in the world, where each of us is most likely to unfold and best nurture our souls. The book follows Joan and Philip in their search for their place on the planet, journeying from dream to dream, country to country, and finally to the untimely and heartbreaking death of this wonderfully impossible and beloved man.
Despite his tragic end, Philip was too loveably quirky for the book to be heavy or depressing. Heiman shares her story with pathos and humor, as well as offering reflections on the complex nature of loving, dying, grieving, and healing.
Growing up in New England, my mother had a set of books that she kept in the living room, more for display than anything else. It was The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read them and instantly became hooked on horror. In the seventh grade, I entertained my friends at a sleepover by telling them the mysterious clanking noise (created by the baseboard heater) was the ghost of a woman who had once lived in the farmhouse, forced to cannibalize her ten children during a particularly bad winter. And I’ve been enjoying scaring people ever since.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunged off a waterfall to her death, leaving behind a legacy shrouded in secrets. Her great-niece Julia, a struggling journalist recovering from a divorce, seeks answers decades later.
Tasked with retrieving Dr. Greer’s discovery–a flower that could have world-changing properties–Julia unearths a story rife with hidden agendas and a missionary community unwilling to share the truth. As she confronts the eerie legends and a fellow traveler with his own motives, Julia finds that the longer she stays, the thinner the line between reality and the fantastical becomes until she…
From the award-winning author of Dead Souls and Poe comes an all-new bone-chilling novel where a mysterious island holds the terrifying answers to a woman's past and future.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunges off a waterfall to her death, convinced the spirits of her dead husband and daughter had joined the nightmarchers-ghosts of ancient warriors that rise from their burial sites on moonless nights. But was it suicide, or did a strange young missionary girl, Agnes, play a role in Irene's deteriorating state of mind?
