Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

Of all the book recommendations on my list, this book fits the theme the best.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers is a novella about grief and loss, and tells the story of a father and his two sons who unexpectedly lose their wife/mother and are visited by a crow who is the literal manifestation of their grief.

Gorgeous and strange (part of the book is seen through the crow’s eyes!), this was the book that made me realize how blurred the line between prose and poetry can be, and why I love books that are surreal and challenging. It… show more.

Over the past few years I have had the great pleasure of learning from a number of academics and researchers who work in literary studies rather than psychology.

The capacity for fiction to express and represent the more uncanny and ineffable aspects of human experience is unbounded, and I have my colleagues to thank for introducing me to the stories of Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel, and Virginia Woolf.

I could have chosen any number of texts, but one I particularly like is Grief is the Thing with Feathers. Poetic in form but still a novel, it brilliantly depicts the… show more.

Difficult to categorize into a specific genre, Max Porter’s novel uses a tragi-comic approach to deal with how the grief of a husband and father of two sons is experienced using the metaphor of a crow. “Crow” is an anthropomorphic figure who represents grief in this short book. He talks to the husband, telling him that he will take him through the vestiges of grief until, as Crow finally states, “You don’t need me anymore.” The book ends with Crow bidding the bereaved husband/father goodbye. This book helped my understanding—along with several essays on the sad, dark, and comical aspects… show more.

This fiction story touched my heart and while it isn’t about suicide, it is about grief and loss from a sudden death and tells the story of two young boys and their father and the crow that refuses to leave until they no longer need him. This book had moments of raw emotion as well as unexpected humour that I found a tonic. It’s sad and funny and unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It is a story that stayed with me for a long time. 

A husband loses his wife. Two young boys lose their mother. They are unmoored, in shambles. Into their house moves the perfect visitor, a most unlikely and unloveable therapist: a crow. He stays as long as he needs to stay, a sort of Mary Poppins of the soul. This strange multi-genre book really made me think about grief and listening. Listening to oneself, first and foremost.

Porter is more than happy to veer into zany and uncharted territory, which is a perfect place to explore death. In this story, a talking crow acts as a companion to a grieving young father who recently lost his wife. Why not? The writing is sublime and unlike anything else you’ve read, guaranteed. The story is weird and wild and Porter is completely unapologetic about it, which is what we’d all like to be.