DEATH/GRIEF BOOKS
An on-going list compiled by Andrea Goldsmith
Lisa Appignanesi EVERYDAY MADNESS (2018)
Written following the death of the author’s husband. The anger, the grief. Very honest, particularly re the anger.
Julian Barnes NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF (2008)
This is about Barnes’ fear of death. Julian’s wife Pat Kavanagh died in October 2008 a the age of 68. That was relevant to me in reading this book, given the death of Dorothy 2 months later. (Later note: I’ve read this book a couple of times more. It’s excellent, a perfect mix of the personal and the discursive.)
Julian Barnes LEVELS OF LIFE (2013)
Small book consisting of 3 essays, the first two devoted to ballooning (leaving the earth) and the third to the death of Barnes’s wife Pat and its aftermath. I skimmed the first two essays, was gripped by the third. So many responses/observations I recognised.
Julian Barnes ‘For Sorrow There Is No Remedy’ NYRB 7/4/2011
Review of Joyce Carol Oates’ book: A WIDOW’S STORY: A MEMOIR. This is an excellent essay that draws fully on what Barnes knows of grief. And he knows a lot. The piece begins with a reference to Dr. Johnson’s essay, ‘The Proper Means of Regulating Sorrow’, in which he identifies grief as being unique among the human passions. For other desires and emotions there is an ending or a remediation or some sort of satisfaction, ‘But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; sorrow requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past be recalled.’
Simone de Beauvoir A VERY EASY DEATH (1964)
This tells of the death of de Beauvoir’s mother. It’s very very good. ‘A hard task, dying, when one loves life so much.’ (92). ‘If you love life, immortality [through your books etc] is not consolation for death.’ (106). And after the mother dies, at the funeral: ‘We were taking part in the dress rehearsal for our own burial. The misfortune is that although everyone must come to this, each experiences the adventure in solitude.’ [or isolation]. (115)
Jim Crace BEING DEAD (1999)
Crace is always good value – his Arcadia remains one of my favourite novels. Murder and marriage in this one.
Marie Darrieussecq TOM IS DEAD (2007)
About the death of a child. I thought it was very good – until the ending.
Joan Didion THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING (2005)
Everyone raves about this book, but when I read it (very soon after the death of Dorothy) I hated it. Didion was just too cool for me, too self-conscious about writing something for publication.
NOTE ADDED June 2022. I have just reread this book for the third time. The first time was in 2005 when Dot and I were visiting SF (the book was bought from Cody’s). I read the book again after Dot died. There are marginalia made at that time which show many points of similarities, and yet, in the essay I wrote ‘Home Triptych’ published in 2010, I give the book short shrift. The book shows the panic and madness that is grief. I now think it is very very good. Very very true.
Margaret Drabble THE PATTERN IN THE CARPET (2009)
About jigsaws & other ways of living through the painful days of a beloved’s serious illness, in this case Drabble’s husband, the biographer, Michael Holroyd.
Douglas Dunn ELEGIES (1985)
A series of poems written after the death of Dunn’s wife. These are fabulous poems, lucid, striking, poignant. Described on the cover as the finest long poem of death and loss since Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’.
David Ellis DEATH AND THE AUTHOR (2008)
This book tells what happened following D.H. Lawrence’s death. It’s an interesting story, and of course interesting because it is a writer at the centre.
Sandra Gilbert DEATH’S DOOR (2006)
Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve. I particularly liked this book for its literary references: Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Larkin’s Aubade, Byatt’s The Conjugal Angel, Shelley’s Adonais – all of which I read after finishing the Gilbert. One of the best.
GILGAMESH
In the Stephen Mitchell translation. Gilgamesh’s grief over Enkidu is moving and lyrical. Not one to read in the early days, but excellent a few years along.
Andrea Goldsmith THE MEMORY TRAP, REUNION, THE BURIED LIFE
For others reading this list: I created a character in THE MEMORY TRAP, Beth, whose husband Scott has died. She speaks of the loss, the absence – and yes, the anger (towards Kübler-Ross, for example) – she shows what it’s like to live inside that absence. She appears in the latter part of the book. In REUNION, a character opts for voluntary euthanasia. And THE BURIED LIFE (2025) has death as one of its main themes.
Edward Hirsch GABRIEL (2014)
A long poem about the death of Hirsch’s son, Gabriel, a wild spirit, who lived large and died young. There’s a pace and tone to this poem that really held me. And love.
Hölderin THE DEATH OF EMPEDOCLES (1846)
A ‘mourning play’ in verse. Empedocles commits suicide on Etna. Role of music here. A classic
Ted Hughes BIRTHDAY LETTERS (1998)
The brilliant collection that tells of his relationship with Plath from first meeting to tragic end. These poems were written in the decades after she died (the decades of Hughes’s public silence and everyone else’s public accusations), and finally published in 1998, the year of Hughes’s death. These are powerful poems of love and longing, and anguish.
Ted Hughes CROW (1970)
This volume was written after Hughes’s second wife, Assia, killed herself and their daughter Shura. The poetry is harsh and mocking and punishing and irresistible. The crow is always a step ahead of everyone, including God.
Caroline Jones THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (2009)
About the death of her father – useful for those who have lost a beloved parent and/or when the beloved one spent their last time in hospital.
C.S. Lewis A GRIEF OBSERVED (1961)
An oldie but a goodie. Lewis was a practising Christian and his religious beliefs filter through this book, but still it spoke to me about loss, about the VACANCY.
THE OXFORD BOOK OF DEATH Ed by D.J. Enright (1983)
Prose and poetry going back to anonymous and finishing around 1980. Divided into 14 sections including The hour of death, suicide, graveyards and funerals, the detaath of children, of animals, last words.
Jim Perrin WEST (2010)
‘A journey through the landscape of loss.’ Jim Perrin is a man of nature. When both his son and wife die, he traverses various meaningful landscapes and relates them to the person and his loss.
Max Porter GRIEF IS THIS THING WITH FEATHERS (2015)
A wonderful, idiosyncratic book about a father and his young son in the period following the death of their wife/mother. It is CROW who comes to them in grief and leads them out of the darkness. It is Hughes’s crow, but in a kinder guise.
Christopher Reid. ‘PROFESSOR WINTERHORN’S JOURNEY’a narrative poem included in the collection, Nonsense. Faber & Faber. 2012.
This long poem reveals the mystery and power of grief. Prof Winterhorn,
a recently widowed academic, travels across the world to a conference. A strangely beguiling story about grief – with a light touch.
David Rieff SWIMMING IN A SEA OF DEATH (2008)
David Rieff is Susan Sontag’s son. They were very close. The relationship became increasingly troubled, particularly after SS coupled up with Annie Liebovitz. This is an intense meditation on the death of a loved one when guilt and regrets are involved. I thought it very good.
Philip Roth EVERYMAN 2006
Not a book for everyone. Tells of one man’s long medical fight against his own mortality – and all the mistakes he made in his personal life. (And a detailed description of how to dig a grave. p. 173-80 – which I refer to in THE BURIED LIFE.)
José Saramago DEATH AT INTERVALS (2005)
This is not a book for the early raw stages. But later (12 years later for me) I loved it. It puts death in her (sic) place. In this novel, death goes on strike, so no one dies. It results in disaster. When death returns to work, the strangest things happens (no spoilers).
Wallace Stegner CROSSING TO SAFETY (1987)
There is a death from cancer in this wonderful book about friendship and love and the things that can go wrong. It should have finished a lot earlier, but the first 200 pages are so good it is worth reading for that. The next book of Stegner’s I read, ALL THE LITTLE LIVE THINGS, also has a cancer death in it, but it is not in the same class as CROSSING TO SAFETY.
Elizabeth Strout ABIDE WITH ME (2006)
This is a novel about grief, although you don’t realise it until the end. It’s wonderful. Her best.
Colm Toibin NORA WEBSTER (2014)
It is a quiet story of Nora, a mother of 4, following the death of her husband, Michael. It follows her as she finds a job, tries to make ends meet, deals with the children, and the absence of Michael. It is gentle and utterly convincing. I found it strangely moving.
Tolstoy THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH (1886)
This novella is a classic. I’ve read it several times over the decades, and each time I draw something fresh from it. Its message: you need to live well to die well. The main character, as he is dying, is plagued by the following thought: ‘What if my entire life, my entire conscious life, simply was not the real thing?’ (p.126). And ‘the real thing’, he comes to realise is to see others, and feel for others; the real thing turns away from the self and its gratifications.
Irving Yalom STARING INTO THE SUN (2008)
This book takes as its foundation the Epicurus maxim: where life is death is not, and where death is life is not. It tackles the widespread fear of death, the resistance to our mortality. And it is Yalom, so it is very very good.
Irving Yalom and Marilyn Yalom A MATTER OF DEATH AND LIFE (2021)
Theirs is a long marriage – both now in late 80s – and Marilyn has cancer from which she will not recover. Each writes alternative chapters. A deeply intimate book, and so very wise.
Rafael Yglesias A HAPPY MARRIAGE (2009)
The author calls this a novel, and while it IS novelistic in form, his wife did die of cancer as did the wife in this book. No relationship is perfect, even the best, and neither is this relationship. It is a real book, a real story, considered and authentic.
THE LONG PALE CORRIDOR Ed by Judi Benson and Agneta Falk (1996)
There are some beauties in this book. Anne Sexton, Carlon Anne Duffy, Douglas Dunn , Ted Hughes and much much more.
The anthologies BEING ALIVE and STAYING ALIVE. Some wonderful poems in both.
FROM THE YOM KIPPUR MEMORIAL SERVICE (P.490)
In the rising of the sun and in its going down, we remember them.
In the blowing of the wind and in the chill of winter, we remember them.
In the opening buds and in the rebirth of spring, we remember them.
In the blueness of the sky and in the warmth of summer, we remember them.
In the rustling of leaves and in the beauty of autumn, we remember them.
In the beginning of the year and when it ends, we remember them.
When we are weary and in need of strength, we remember them.
When we are lost and sick at heart, we remember them.
When we have joys we yearn to share, we remember them.
So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us, as we remember them.
A shelf of death books – including the classics: Ariès, Laqueur, Mitford and Waugh.
NERUDA. Two poems. ‘
THE DEAD WOMAN
If suddenly you do not exist,
if suddenly you no longer live,
I shall live on.
I do not dare,
I do not dare to write it,
if you die.
I shall live on.
For where a man has no voice,
there, my voice.
Where blacks are beaten,
I cannot be dead.
When my brothers go to prison
I shall go with them.
When victory,
not my victory,
but the great victory comes,
even though I am mute I must speak;
I shall see it come even
though I am blind.
No, forgive me.
If you no longer live,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping,
but I shall stay alive,
because above all things
you wanted me indomitable,
and, my love, because you know that
I am not only a man
but all mankind.
THERE’S NO FORGETTING (SONATA)
Were you to ask me where I’ve been
I would have to say, “There comes a time.”
I would have to tell how dirt mottles the rocks,
how the river, running, runs out of itself:
I know only what left the birds bereaved,
the sea forsaken, or my sister weeping.
Why so many places, why does one day
cling to another? Why does a night’s blackness
drain into the mouth? Why the dead?
Were you to ask where I come from, I would have to talk
with shattered things,
with all too bitter tools,
with massive festering beasts, now and then,
and with my grief-bitten heart.
Unremembered are those who crossed over
and the pale dove asleep in oblivion,
only teary faces,
fingers at the throat,
and whatever falls from the leaves:
the darkness of a burnt-out day,
a day flavoured with our curdled blood.
Here I have violets, swallows,
we want anything and it appears
in that long train of impressions
that marks the passing of kindness and time.
But let’s go no further than the teeth,
we won’t chew on husks heaped up by silence,
because I don’t know how to answer:
there are so many dead,
and so many levees the red sun has cloven
and so many heads that knock against hulls,
and so many hands that shut up kisses,
and so many things I want to forget.
(Translated by Forrest Gander)