s. e. smith is the author of All My Dead Cats and Other Losses: Practicing Good Grief in a Culture That Fears Mourning, out now from HarperOne. Below, smith recommends books about grief and mourning.
As a writer who’s been covering death and grief for a very long time, my inbox is constantly filled with letters from readers desperate for someone to hear them and sit with them in their grief for a while. There’s a sense of well, you’re the expert, can you help me figure this out?
Sifting through these deeply intimate letters, I keep coming back to two themes as I think about how the way we mourn in America is deeply broken.
It’s in part because we consider it a personal problem, rather than something we should carry and witness together. It’s also because we value some lives and losses more than others—sometimes society doesn’t even recognize a life or a loss at all.
Thinking about the way grief is bigger than ourselves, not something we can repair like a lamp we learned to rewire by watching a YouTube tutorial, brings me to these recommendations.
Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim brings up confrontational questions about whose lives are valued by society, and whose are marked for loss, debility, and death. She doesn’t leave those questions abstract, instead applying them to a deep analysis of settler colonial violence in Palestine.
Sarah Jaffe’s From the Ashes is a superb exploration of grief as a collective, anti-capitalist project, braided with memoir as she discusses her father’s death in a really effective blend of the political and the personal that hit me particularly hard when I re-read it after my father’s death in February.
Judith Butler’s Frames of War feels more applicable than ever—they cut to the heart of some very uncomfortable truths about state violence and precarity and ask who society thinks is worthy of mourning.
And for a fantastic, stark, provocative grief memoir, I love Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave, which follows the bewildering and often alienating aftermath of losing her entire family in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.
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