Grief

The quiet endurance of grief. I love this small, meditative novella that captures the essence of grief as it continues to linger in the body, the mind, and the heart long past the comfortability of those around you.

While the story focuses on the main character, an aging, gay professor who has come to Washington, DC, for a visiting professorship after losing his mother to a long illness, each person encountered is grieving something in their own way (I truly love that Holleran mirrors the main character’s grief with that of Mary Todd Lincoln’s after losing her husband to an… show more.

This is a short novel, a slim book that packs a lot in its pages. A fictional work about the loss of a loved one and the emptiness of one’s life. How do you fill your days? How do you go on with your life when every street, every building holds a memory of the one you lost?

This was a deeply emotional work of fiction that speaks to my own empty days after the loss. It felt as if I was walking with the main character as he went through his days trying to find purpose and meaning. It… show more.

For my generation in New York, the Plague Years were the equivalent of war, so many battles fought, too many lost, and those who lived through it all as scarred as any veterans of wars fought with guns. Doing volunteer work in the gay community put me close to the battle lines, and I read fiction about the time to help me honor the ghosts. This brief, exquisite, often surprisingly funny novel is an elegy to all that loss. It came out not long after my own novel set in that era, and I wanted to read about characters who,… show more.