Tag Archives: grief-lit

Things That Are Making Me Happy This Week

Posted by Kate W in Stuff and Nonsense and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

01. Best night at the Wheeler Centre seeing Sloane Crosley. She talked about writing both fiction and nonfiction, noting that “In complimenting fiction, people say ‘It’s so believable, so realistic’ but in complimenting memoir they say ‘It’s unbelievable!’”. Plus I was thrilled to hear that there’s a movie script for Cult Classic underway, and that her new work of narrative nonfiction focuses on grief (Grief is for People, out next year). Continue reading →

Sunbathing by Isobel Beech

Posted by Kate W in Fiction and tagged with , , , , , , ,

Isobel Beech has produced a wonderfully quiet meditation on grief in her debut novel, Sunbathing.

After weeks of grieving, the unnamed woman at the centre of the story books a flight to Italy, to stay with her friends Giulia and Fab, in the lead-up to their wedding. The couple live in the mountains of Abruzzo, in an old villa with a large garden, and the woman’s days fall into a rhythm of tending the vegetable patch, walking to the nearby village, and reflecting on who and what she had lost in Melbourne. Continue reading →

Childless by Sian Prior

Posted by Kate W in Non-fiction and tagged with , , , , , , ,

Sian Prior said something at the Melbourne Writers Festival last year that has stuck in my mind – “‘Childless’…there’s that threat of deep sadness in that one word.” She went on to say that if she walked into a bookshop and saw the title, Childless, she wouldn’t buy the book. But I did. Continue reading →

Found, Wanting by Natasha Sholl

Posted by Kate W in Non-fiction and tagged with , , , , , , , ,

I recently did a Grief 101 session for colleagues, mostly to explain the types of grief other than that associated with bereavement. At the end, someone asked about further reading and without hesitation, I recommended Natasha Sholl’s memoir, Found, Wanting. The ‘without hesitation’ bit is noteworthy because I’m usually reluctant to hold up a memoir as a means of understanding grief in a text-booky-way, but Sholl’s writing is succinct and beautiful, compelling and devastatingly real and it would be hard not to identify with what she says in a helpful way. Continue reading →