My 3 favourite books on grief 📚
A few weeks ago I asked The Grief Gang community on Instagram to share their favourite books on grief and it has become quite the extensive list.
It contains the likes of fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, guidebooks…It’s the full works.
You can click the link here to read the post if you’re on Instagram and find your next griefy read!
I also wanted to use this opportunity to share a small handful of my favourite books on grief and why. There are so many favourites but I chose these 3 just for today.
When Grief Equals Love by Lizzie Pickering.
It’s good to get in early that Lizzie is now a dear friend of mine (and she did not slip me a fiver to rave about her book lol!). I’d love this book regardless if Lizzie was a friend or not.
See below about the book (Unbound website):
“When Lizzie Pickering's young son Harry died in 2000, she set out on a journey to understand how she could survive her grief and learn to live with it. In When Grief Equals Love, she details the lessons she’s learned from her own experiences and those of others, who share their thoughts in this moving and tender book.
Lizzie opens her diaries, written in the early years after Harry’s death, revealing her observations on the grief of his siblings and family, what helped and what hurt. Revisiting those diaries, she reflects on time passing, and what has changed for her and her family since.
Lizzie looks at the myth of closure, survivor’s energy and cumulative grief – when life experiences pile up and become too much to bear. She includes interviews with bereaved friends, who share their own insights, and she provides a toolkit based on what has helped her and what she recommends to those she now helps with grief guidance.
In most lives, unfortunately, grief and loss are inevitable. But living with grief can still be living. This book is for those going through grief and anyone who might need to support them. There are no easy answers, but nobody should have to cope alone.”
Why I love it?
There is something about Lizzie’s diary entries that will stay with you forever. Everything Lizzie wrote, though our losses are completely different, jumped out of the page and into my heart.
She encapsulates in those diary entries what living with grief everyday is like. These pages hold agony, hope and so much realness.
You Are Not Alone by Cariad Lloyd.
This really was the book I’d been waiting for. A highly anticipated grief book that did not disappoint! Cariad’s podcast throughout the years has resonated with thousands, if not millions, so it was no surprise her book would.
See below about the book (Waterstones website):
“In You Are Not Alone, Cariad shares all that she has learned from Griefcast. She reflects on her own grief, the grief of others, and the psychology and science behind how our society deals with death and loss. Funeral thoughts, therapy, coping with anniversaries, bad friends, good friends, birthdays, weddings, missing them, not missing them - this is grief in all its sad, surprising, awkward, tender and sometimes funny forms.
You Are Not Alone is a road map for all of us: for anybody who has ever felt lost in grief, who would like to help someone they know through theirs, or who just wants to understand life a little better.”
Why I love it?
This was the book 19 year old Amber needed. Plain and simple. Cariad too being young and bereaved knew what it was like to navigate the world as a teenager without a parent. Once I finished this book, I felt like I’d done something for that 19 year old version of me. I’d gone back to her, looked after her, understood her a bit better/
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
Get the tissues out for this one. A classic. A book that I recommend time and time again.
See below about the book (Goodreads website):
“Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.
This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."
Why I love it?
There were many moments when reading that took my breathe away for it’s realism. For a book that on paper should be defined as heavy, I found it one of the most easily digestible books on grief and mourning. It was astonishing to read how perfect Didion could depict the human experience of grieving, like she was literally in your head. A 10/10 must read in my opinion.
So, those are my current top 3 books on grief! I’d love to know what yours are?