The best books about grief: literary companions after loss

Wave is an extraordinary and brutally honest memoir about the 2004 tsunami that claimed the lives of an estimated 230,000 people, including the author’s parents, husband, and two sons. All of this happens in the book’s first devastating chapter. Deraniyagala uses the rest of the memoir to move back and forward in time. In the aftermath of the tsunami, she doesn’t want to live, but through remembering the past—the happy life she lived with her family—she is able to face a grief almost beyond words. No matter the loss—in my case, my mother to COVID in 2021—Wave reminds us that we all suffer and that we are capable of great resilience.

I met the poet Nick Flynn over twenty years ago, not long before the publication of his most famous book, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, a memoir about his father’s homelessness. Since then, he has become one of my favorite writers. The Reenactments—for my money, his best book—takes us through the surreal experience of Another Bullshit Night being turned into a film. Robert De Niro plays his father and Julianne Moore plays his mother. De Niro meets Flynn’s father, studying him for character traits. In the most heartbreaking sections, Flynn relives his mother’s suicide as it’s filmed. As Flynn writes: “How often are you offered the chance for a complete reenactment of the day of the disaster?”

Most people know the 1980 film, directed by Robert Redford, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, but trust me, the 1976 novel by Judith Guest is every bit as powerful. I own four editions of it, including a first-edition hardcover—that’s how much I love this book. The novel focuses on seventeen-year-old Conrad Jarrett, just home after a suicide attempt and eight months in a psychiatric hospital. His father is worrisome and doting, his mother is cold. Conrad turns to a psychiatrist—theirs is one of the great relationships I’ve read in fiction—to help him deal with the loss of his older brother and the sober realization that sometimes, no matter what you do, you can’t save someone.

James Agee might be one of the most underappreciated American writers of the 20th century and one of its great stylists. I splurged for a first-edition hardcover of this novel: its pages smell like 1957, the year it was published, two years after Agee died suddenly at 45. It won the Pulitzer Prize. Its famous prologue, “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” is a masterpiece. This autobiographical novel, largely based on the death of Agee’s father in 1915, tells the story of a boy’s father killed in a car accident. It is an alternately quiet and lyrical work that is as much about love as loss.

I’ve probably read this amazing book more than any other book of poems. It is Howe’s elegy to her brother John, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989. I love how the book reads almost like a novel in verse, returning to her brother time and again. Howe’s poems bring together the physical and spiritual in transcendent ways. It was one the of first books I reread after I lost my mother during the pandemic—a companion during my grief. The famous title poem explores the everydayness of life even after loss—clogged kitchen sinks, groceries, parking the car, all that her brother “finally gave up.” The final line of the poem captures the book perfectly: “I am living, I remember you.”