Comfort: A Journey Through Grief (2009)

by Ann Hood

From Booklist: How does one recover from the plenary grief of losing a precious five-year-old child? Novelist Hood’s answer is simple: one doesn’t. After her daughter died suddenly from an antibiotic-resistant strep infection, she just moved along with life, at first muddling through days and weeks of hearing but not comprehending the advice of well-meaning friends and family. Next, the grief began to shift from being her primary focus to second place, then into periodic episodes of overwhelming anguish. Hood’s sometimes-too-painful-to-read memoir bares all the raw emotions, from denial to despair to anger, that she experienced. The grief never really leaves, she says; it just stops eclipsing all else. Especially after she took up knitting, a pastime that occupied her mind in such a way that she couldn’t knit and grieve at the same time. Ultimately, she, her husband, and their son moved on and, it seems, finally found their way to a likeness of the happiness they once had.

This is a truly moving review from the LA Times. SOMETIMES IT takes guts to be a critic. So often you feel you have no right to be pronouncing on someone else's hard work and insight. Your whiny little voice wheedles off the page. And every once in a while, the emotions you encounter in a book are so raw -- not sentimental, not artful, just plain raw -- that you can barely keep reading, much less recommend what you're reading to anyone else. "Comfort" is such a book. After you read it, you feel utterly depleted.

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