The psychotherapist and author of “Grief Works” picks books that changed how she understands dying and grief. She will be speaking at the inaugural Big Brue festival of ideas in Bruton, Somerset, 19-20 September.
Grief Counselling and Grief Therapy
J. William Worden, 1982
This is a book for therapists, but valuable to anyone. Worden’s four tasks of mourning helped us move away from the rigid idea that grief follows fixed stages. We cannot control the loss, but we can engage with the work of adapting to it. That idea offers agency when life feels helpless.
With the End in Mind
Kathryn Mannix, 2017
Drawing on decades in palliative medicine, Mannix tells stories of ordinary people as they approach death. She writes with such compassion and clarity that the frightening becomes more knowable. It’s a book that helps us prepare for the deaths of those we love and have the conversations we often avoid.
The Grieving Brain
Mary-Frances O’Connor, 2022
A neuroscientist, O’Connor explains that grief is a form of learning. After someone dies, the brain must slowly update its understanding of the world. She helps explain the yearning, confusion and repetition of grief, while offering the deeply reassuring knowledge that adaptation takes time.
Continuing Bonds
Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman and Steven L. Nickman, 1996
This collection challenges the old belief that we should detach from the person who died – forget and move on. Instead, it shows that the relationship carries on, in a changed form. Death ends a life, but the love never dies.
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion, 2005
Didion’s account of her husband’s sudden death captures the strange logic of grief with great precision. She shows how the mind knows someone has died while another part still expects them to return. It is fiercely personal, yet almost every bereaved reader will recognise something of themselves within it.