I am a member of an unfortunate tribe, the tribe of grieving mothers who write. Upon learning that my newborn son was profoundly brain-damaged, I kept a diary. Writing those pages helped me make sense of his prognosis and figure out how to care for him before he died. Later, my diary helped me write my memoir Holding Silvan: A Brief Life which went on to be named a “Best Book” of the year by both Library Journal and the Boston Globe. Today, I write and work with other writers trying to craft their own stories of loss. Each experience of grief is unique. The five memoirs I’m recommending give voice to a variety of maternal losses — from stillbirth to murder. While each of these memoirs is powerful in its own way, the love in them is universal.
From the start, we know this book will be about a stillborn baby. From the start, we also hear about a second living baby. Weaving multiple storylines together, Elizabeth McCracken structures her narrative so perfectly that I read it with bated breath. Mixing life and death, wisdom and humor, she moves from a seagull stealing a sandwich on a beach in Florida to a storybook castle in the cow-studded French countryside. Full of honest observations about the pain and joy of life, this is a wonderfully cathartic read.
"This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending," writes Elizabeth McCracken in her powerful, inspiring memoir. A prize-winning, successful novelist in her 30s, McCracken was happy to be an itinerant writer and self-proclaimed spinster. But suddenly she fell in love, got married, and two years ago was living in a remote part of France, working on her novel, and waiting for the birth of her first child.
This book is about what happened next. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she learned that her baby boy had died. How do you deal with and recover from…
When a disastrous tsunami hit Sri Lanka in 2004, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her mother, her father, her husband, and her two young sons. Written at the advice of a therapist, Wave could have been an unbearable book. Instead, Deraniyagala’s prose is breathtaking as she relates the horror of being sucked into the wave and the aftermath of finding herself alone. She does not claim she will ever recover from this loss, but with her words, she breathes life into her lost family, and I feel privileged to have known them.
The book opens and we are inside the wave: thirty feet high, moving at twenty-five mph, racing two miles inland. And from there into the depths of the author's despair: how to live now that her life has been undone?
Sonali Deraniyagala tells her story - the loss of her two boys, her husband, and her parents - without artifice or sentimentality. In the stark language of unfathomable sorrow, anger, and guilt: she struggles through the first months following the tragedy -- someone always at her side to prevent her from harming herself, her…
Upon receiving the news that her two young daughters had been killed by a drunk driver, Genevieve Jurgensen didn’t think she could go on, let alone ever write about her loss. Fortunately for us, she eventually found a way to tell this story. Through letters to a friend, she draws us in, circling the pain of that terrible day, musing about the mysterious ways in which loss can coexist with a happy, ongoing life. With its raw and intimate feel, the book is a profoundly moving testimony to the complicated process of healing.
What do you do, how do you live, when both of your daughters are killed on the same afternoon?
On April 30, 1980, Genevieve Jurgensen found herself facing that question when she lost her four- and seven-year-old daughters to a drunk driver. Here she presents her search for an answer.
Written to her adult daughter who lies in a coma, Isabel Allende begins, “Listen Paula, I am going to tell you a story so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost.” With that, Allende goes on to tell the great “legend” of their family in Chile, including impetuous, magical women one of whom sprouts wings. Moving back and forth between luscious storytelling and the tension of the hospital, Allende keeps her daughter company while awaiting the outcome of her illness. In this skillful way, Allende finds a place for Paula in a legend larger than life.
"Beautiful and heartrending. . . . Memoir, autobiography, epicedium, perhaps even some fiction: they are all here, and they are all quite wonderful."-Los Angeles Times
In this literary classic, New York Times bestselling author Isabel Allende recalls the story of her beloved daughter and her remarkable family's past.
When her daughter, Paula, became gravely ill and fell into a coma, Isabel Allende began to write the story of her family for her unconscious child. Bizarre ancestors are introduced; delightful and bitter childhood memories are shared; amazing anecdotes of youthful years are relived, and the most intimate secrets are quietly passed…
Before their son died, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin never imagined speaking publicly or starting a movement. It was only after Trayvon, a seventeen-year-old Black boy walking home from the store, was shot and killed by a white man who claimed he felt threatened, that they realized they would have to fight for justice. No parent should know the loss of a child like this, but as the subtitle puts it, this is a “parents’ story of love, injustice, and the birth of a movement” and we have Fulton and Martin to thank for turning their grief into a call to action for us all.
On February 26th 2012 seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking home with a bag of Skittles and a can of juice when a fatal encounter with a gun-wielding neighbourhood watchman ended his young life. In a matter of weeks, Trayvon Martin's name would be spoken by President Obama, honored by professional athletes, and passionately discussed all over traditional and social media. Trayvon's parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, driven by their intense love for their lost son, launched a nationwide campaign for justice that would change the USA and the world.
Five years after his tragic death, Travyon Martin has become…
In the opening of Holding Silvan: A Brief Life, Monica Wesolowska gives birth to her first child, a healthy-seeming boy who is taken from her arms for “observation” when he won’t stop crying. Within days, Monica and her husband have been given the grimmest of prognoses for Silvan. They must make a choice about his life.
The story that follows is not of typical maternal heroism. There is no medical miracle here. Instead, we find the strangest of hopes, the hope for as good a death as possible. In clear and unflinching prose, this startling memoir bears witness not only to the joy and pain of a son’s brief life but it raises crucial end-of-life questions for us all.
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
Locked In Locked Out: Surviving a Brainstem Stroke
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
