11 July,2021 06:57 AM IST | Mumbai | Sucheta Chakraborty
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This book (Knopf) by iconic American novelist and essayist Joan Didion, known for celebrated collections like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, finds her writing about her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne's death and the grief that follows even as her daughter Quintana battles a parallel medical emergency. Didion reads other writers' accounts of loss like CS Lewis's A Grief Observed-writing itself essential to this process of coming to terms. The memoir charts her 40-year marriage, and the âmagical thinking' she experiences, where she gives away Dunne's clothes but cannot bring herself to give away his shoes, because he would need them when he returned. In 2007, Didion also adapted the book for Broadway, and in 2011 published Blue Nights, this time on the death of her daughter.
In his first work of non-fiction, a collection of essays titled Loss (HarperCollins India), acclaimed Indian author Siddharth Shanghvi writes about the death of his parents and also his beloved dog Bruschetta, dwelling on memories and bringing warmth and understanding to each relationship and the gifts it offered, as he charts the arduous route towards healing. Shanghvi has said that the way of living with grief is to question how it transformed oneself, and that the intention of this anthology was to create a sense of community, something a reader might find comfort and reassurance in, given that Indian rituals around mourning can deny the mourner a chance to process what s/he has lost.
Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie known for her deeply perceptive works on gender, race, identity and history like Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Americanah (2013), built on an essay published in The New Yorker written in the weeks and months following the death of her beloved father James Nwoye Adichie in June last year. In May 2021, Notes on Grief (4th Estate) was published. In it, she pays a moving tribute to her father who was Nigeria's first professor of statistics while attempting to understand the grief his sudden departure plunges her into, a loss made lonelier by the pandemic. She writes about the cross-continental Zoom calls the family spoke on every Sunday, the immediate shock of the news, the rage, disbelief, and pain that follow, and the memories that come rushing back. She reflects on language's relationship with grief and its sheer inadequacy in the face of its enormity, the physicality of grief as well as its performative aspects, all of which will ring with a distressing familiarity for those mourning as she is.
In The Long Goodbye (Riverhead Books), American non-fiction writer and poet Meghan O'Rourke documents with candour her mother Barbara's late-stage diagnosis and death from colorectal cancer on Christmas day 2008 and what transpired in between and after. She moves through high-strung family situations in the face of an impending tragedy, the pain of seeing a parent change and weaken with sickness, to reflections on the finality of death, the uniqueness and loneliness of bereavement, the anger and resentment of those left behind to carry on, descriptions of the five stages of grief as conceived by Elizabeth Kübler-Roth: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and the rituals around and the outward indicators of mourning. Writing, O'Rourke has said, has always been her way of making sense of the world and her obsessive journaling of events was her way of retaining sanity in the midst of the strangeness of the experience.
