Molly's Reads

Molly's Reads

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GRIEF

GUIDE
  • Modern Loss: Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome. by Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner; Illustrations by Peter Arkle.

    • Published by Harper Wave, 2018

    Amazon Link

    “It’s so curious,” the French novelist Colette wrote in a letter to a recently widowed friend, “one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer … and everything collapses.”

MEMOIRS
  • Instead of a Letter: A Memoir by Diana Athill.

    • Published by Doubleday, 1962

    Amazon Link

    It had taken a long time, but the whole thing had at last been put away as though behind a glass door – always there to be looked at, it need no longer be felt.

  • The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs.

    • Published by Simon & Schuster, 2018

    Amazon Link

    Their very existence is the one dark piece I cannot get right within all this. I can let go of a lot of things: plans, friends, career goals, places in the world I want to see, maybe even the love of my life. But I cannot figure out how to let go of mothering them.

NOVELS
  • Before I Go by Colleen Oakley.

    • Published by Gallery Books, 2015

    Amazon Link

    But now I think Jack’s in Denial, which after reading my grief brochure seems like a place you go to, like the beach or Target or the dentist, for an indefinite amount of time.

  • When You Read This: A Novel by Mary Adkins.

    • Published by Harper, 2019

    Amazon Link

    It’s like I’m on the subway and I can’t make out the garbled, scratchy announcement, which could be that the train is going out of service, or being rerouted, or just that there’s a slight delay. Do I stay on or do I have to get off here? Do I have cancer or don’t I? Someone, please, for God’s sake. Tell me what is happening so I can decide how to feel.

  • We All Want Impossible Things: A Novel by Catherine Newman.

    • Published by Harper, 2022

    Amazon Link

    The social worker at Sloan Kettering had made a game plan with her, and the idea was to communicate that she would always love him, but also to be somehow crisp and clear about it, to offer that love like it was a heart stamped out of sugar cookie dough, neatly baked and frosted – not a messy anatomical chest full of longing. Full of blood and beating and grief.

LOSS OF PARENT(S)

MEMOIRS
  • The Rules of Inheritance: A Memoir by Claire Bidwell Smith.

    • Published by Hudson Street Press, 2012

    Amazon Link

    I’m nobody’s most important person, and I don’t have a most important person. The tears are streaming down my cheeks now.

  • Joy Enough: A Memoir by Sarah McColl.

    • Published by Liveright, 2019

    Amazon Link

    I loved my mother, and she died. Is that a story?

MEMOIRS – GRAPHIC
  • Dancing at the Pity Party: A Dead Mom Graphic Memoir by Tyler Feder.

    • Published by Dial Books, 2020

    Amazon Link

    She didn’t get to wear a tutu in a parade or give a speech about her “journey.” Her life just got worse and worse until her organs failed

NOVELS
  • Goodbye, Vitamin: A Novel by Rachel Khong.

    • Published by Henry Holt and Company, 2017

    Amazon Link

    I try not to make a habit of playing out the possibilities: if I’d finished college, I’d have been this or that, or something else. It’s a game I try not to play because it doesn’t end any way but the way that it does – the way that it has.

WIDOWS

MEMOIRS
  • Saturday Night Widows: The Adventures of Six Friends Remaking Their Lives by Becky Aikman.

    • Published by Crown, 2013

    Amazon Link

    No, this task of grieving was so much more than missing. It was more like homesickness for a home that was no longer there. A home that had been swept away by a tidal wave, or sucked into a giant sinkhole, or knocked down by a bulldozer to make way for a new Bed Bath & Beyond, never to be seen again. This grieving for my husband was like a permanent exile from that lost home. Like an asylum seeker in a strange land, I would have to learn to live in this world, bereft of familiarity, bereft of comfort. Bereft.

  • Confessions of a Mediocre Widow: Or, How I Lost My Husband and My Sanity by Catherine Tidd.

    • Published by Sourcebooks, 2014

    Amazon Link

    It’s really hard not having that person around whom you can bounce everything off. Oh sure, our friends and family say that we’re not alone, and that they’ll always be with us. But the bottom line is that we’ve lost the person who is as invested in our lives as we are.

  • The Iceberg by Marion Coutts.

    • Published by Atlanic, 2014

    Amazon Link

    He says, So, in spite of Tom’s illness you seem to be doing OK. I reply, There is nothing in spite of Tom’s illness, but yes, we are doing OK.

  • The Light of the World: A Memoir by Elizabeth Alexander.

    • Published by Grand Central Publishing, 2015

    Amazon Link

    But the friendship part of marriage, that is the part that is enacted, that is the part for which you need the person present, and that is what I miss….Yes, I still talk to him. Yes, if I still myself enough I can imagine what he would say to guide me. But that is not the same as friendship itself, and friendship in marriage is its own thing: friendship in a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, or a cappuccino every Sunday morning. Friendship in buying undershirts and underpants. Friendship in picking up a prescription or rescuing a towed car. Friendship in waiting for the phone call after the mammogram. Friendship in toast buttered just so. Friendship in shoveling the snow. I am the one you want to tell. You are the one I want to tell.

  • It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying is Cool Too) by Nora McInerny.

    • Published by Dey Street Books, 2016

    Amazon Link

    My baggage isn’t about someone not growing with me, or not choosing the same direction in life. It’s not even baggage, really. It’s a privilege to carry Aaron with me, and the right man is going to love me – and all the parts of me I got from loving Aaron.

  • No Happy Endings: A Memoir by Nora McInerny.

    • Published by Dey Street Books, 2019

    Amazon Link

    For millions of years, people have been trying to define love, and every definition is inadequate and unsatisfying, but I know what love is not: it is not something that runs out, it is not something we hold over one another, or against one another. The only secret about love that you really need to know is that even when you feel like you’ve worn it out or used it all up, it always, always in your power to make more. Love is the truest magic we do for one another. There is not potion or spell for it, there is just the dazzling act of choosing to be there for one another, over and over again.

  • The Hot Young Widows Club: Lessons on Survival from the Front Lines of Grief by Nora McInerny.

    • Published by Simon & Schuster/ TED, 2019

    Amazon Link

    Why are widows more likely than married people to experience heart failure? Because sometimes, the things that don’t kill us don’t make us stronger. Sometimes they ruin us spiritually, emotionally, financially, and physically. But that’s not a very palatable story, is it? We need the unpalatable story. We need to know that sometimes, the worst thing that happens to us is not a catalyst for creating something bigger. Sometimes, when God closes a door, she also nails shut all the windows, too. The pressure to be good at grief is too much to add to your full plate.

  • Where You Left Me: A Memoir by Jennifer Gardner Trulson.

    • Published by Gallery Books, 2011

    Amazon Link

    Gone. That simple word can be so benign-when someone leaves a room, he’s gone, when your toddler eats her carrots, they’re all gone. Doug went to work and was gone in the usual way. Until he wasn’t. Until that gone became something else entirely, just a few hours later. Gone became “vanished,” “lost,” “evaporated.” It was the worst gone that I’d ever known, and when I replayed it (how many times have I gone back over that morning?), all I can think of is that, if I had it to do over, I’d have dug my fingers into that blue shirt and never let go.

  • Unremarried Widow by Artis Henderson.

    • Published by Simon & Schuster, 2014

    Amazon Link

    But one day, after a game of tennis on the cracked courts of Fort Rucker, Miles looked across the bed of his truck and said, “When I’m with you, no matter what we’re doing-tennis or whatever-I want it to go on forever.” Until that moment I had always said I wouldn’t get married because I could never imagine loving someone enough to be with them forever. But really I could never imagine someone loving me that much.

NOVELS
  • Good Grief by Lolly Winston.

    • Published by Grand Central Publishing, 2004

    Amazon Link

    Okay, so Ethan isn’t coming back. The sympathy cards reverted to phone bills months ago. Even telemarketers have stopped asking for him.

  • Forever, Interrupted: A Novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

    • Published by Washington Square Press, 2013

    Amazon Link

    I liked that he would buy a new shirt for me but he wasn’t going to eat delicately in front of me. It showed that even if he wanted to put forward the best version of himself, he was still always going to be himself.

  • I Liked My Life by Abby Fabiaschi.

    • Published by St. Martin's Griffin, 2018

    Amazon Link

    Rory’s mind explodes with images and recollections. The way she said “God bless you” right before you sneezed. Her hard laughter the day I put lines all over my body with permanent marker because I wanted to be a tiger. When she spoke at Emma’s funeral and said that nothing will ever make sense again, but we still need to seek goodness wherever we go.

  • Monogamy by Sue Miller.

    • Published by Harper, 2020

    Amazon Link

    Now she took the ring and the T-shirt out of the bag and started to put them in the top drawer in Graham’s side of the dresser. But then she stopped and lifted the shirt to her face, inhaled the scent of Graham it still carried, even as she was aware of this as cliché too, of how often she’d read it, seen it. But how impossible it was not to do these things! These things that so many others had done before you. These were the things you wanted to do.

WIDOWERS

SOCIAL SCIENCE
  • The Group: Seven Widowed Fathers Reimagine Life by Donald L. Rosenstein and Justin M. Yopp.

    • Published by Oxford University Press, 2018

    Amazon Link

    While the fathers and their children had each lost the same person, they were grieving different relationships and in different ways. Their grief trajectories did not always converge or progress at the same speed.

MEMOIRS
  • A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias.

    • Published by Scribner, 2009

    Amazon Link

    Months and probably years after Margaret’s death, Dorothy and Leonard [Margaret’s parents] would have each other, a sixty-year marriage still thriving in its routine of bickering and ocean cruises and profound, loving dependency. Enrique was losing the partner of his past and his present and his future just when he most desired her choreography.

  • Laughter, Tears and Braids: A Father’s Journey Through Losing His Wife to Cancer by Bruce Ham.

    • Published by Publishing Unleashed, 2013

    Amazon Link

    I wonder on which page of this journal that I’ll finally write “She died”? In three pages? 30? Will it be in the next journal? Will I die first? Hopefully, in my eighties.

  • Levels of Life by Julian Barnes.

    • Published by Vintage, 2014

    Amazon Link

    Soon, you realise the trap you are in: caught between repeating what you did with her, but without her, and so missing her; or doing new things, things you never did with her, and so missing her differently. You feel sharply the loss of shared vocabulary, of tropes, teases, short cuts, in-jokes, sillinesses, faux rebukes, amatory footnotes – all those obscure references rich in memory but valueless if explained to an outsider.

  • How Angels Die by Guy Blews.

    • Published by Waldorf Publishing, 2014

    Amazon Link
MEMOIRS – QUEER
  • Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Other Four-Letter Words by Michael Ausiello.

    • Published by Atria Books, 2017

    Amazon Link

    It felt good to fight for something without worrying about my emotions getting the best of me or how I'd be perceived or what the possible blowback would be. It felt good to love someone so much that literally nothing was am important as making sure that person was safe and comfortable and protected.

NOVELS
  • Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter.

    • Published by Graywolf Press, 2016

    Amazon Link

    The friends and family who had been hanging around being kind had gone home to their own lives. When the children went to bed the flat had no meaning, nothing moved.

  • How to Talk to a Widower by Jonathan Tropper.

    • Published by Bantam, 2007

    Amazon Link

    And all around us, the quotidian sound track of suburban morning as the neighborhood comes to life, the rhythmic whispers of sprinklers, the whine of leaf blowers and mowers, the buzz of garage doors, the hydraulic hiss of braking school buses. And the people, these freshly shaved and shampooed people leaving their houses to start their days, these people who are moderately successful, who are upwardly mobile, who have things to do, places to go, and people to see. We watch these people going about the business of being alive like a choreographed dance number from our orchestra seats, we three entrenched on our asses, wondering where the hell they get the energy.

  • The Young Widower’s Handbook: A Novel by Tom McAllister.

    • Published by Algonquin Books, 2017

    Amazon Link

    The only thing in his life he’d ever fully committed to was loving her, which he tried to demonstrate via the completion of what some people call the little things, things like washing the dishes and rubbing her feet without be asked and going dress shopping with her on weekends and making the bed even though he didn’t care whether the bed was made or not and anticipating when she would come home stressed from work craving a glass of wine and a bowl of mint chocolate-chip ice cream. He often argued that romance isn’t about Big Gestures, but rather the accumulation of the so-called little things.