Practical Guide to Grief Disrupts Common Myths
Grief is a Sneaky Bitch: An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss
Lisa Keefauver
University of Texas Press, 2024
Softcover, 272 pp.
ISBN: 9781477329306
MSRP: $21.95 USD
Also available: pdf, ebook
Lisa Keefauver is ideally placed to write about grief. She is a social worker, narrative therapist and grief activist. She lectures on "Grief and Loss" at the University of Texas. She hosts a podcast on the subject. Her insights are strongly drawn from her own personal losses, including the death of her husband.
Keefauver observes that “unnecessary suffering” has been caused by the numerous myths and misconceptions about grief. The objective of the book is to challenge those entrenched beliefs (she calls them “the narrow view of grief”), return to reality, and give practical recommendations for people who are grieving. The strength of this book is its clear-eyed view of this most universal of experiences. She knows grief in all its rawness and persistence and she does not hide that from her readers. That honesty will, no doubt, reassure a grieving person averse to trite language and easy solutions.
Grief misconceptions and reality are placed side by side throughout. First, the myth of rapid resolution. Keefauver points to the impossibility of this: grief is unmoored in time, returns in waves, and follows no calendar. Resolution, however much we anticipate this, is also a myth. There is no final chapter to grief; no neat catharsis and then stop. Second, the myth of formula. Keefauver points out that unlike other aspects of life, there is no protocol for grieving, no formula to be processed. Grief is multi-dimensional. It is beyond corralling into discrete elements to be worked through. Third, the myth of coherence. This is the myth that the grieving person can return to their usual life soon, think clearly, and function normally. Keefauver describes the common cognitive and mood changes that occur. Joan Didion captured this perfectly in The Year of Magical Thinking. Keefauver quotes C.S. Lewis from the classic A Grief Observed: “At other times [grief] feels like being mildly drunk or concussed.”
Each chapter poses questions and suggests strategies. The theme of the latter is for the grieving not to focus on what they should be doing but what they are feeling. To move from the general (implicit expectations by society on how people should grieve) to the highly personal (there are no expectations; each person will grieve in their own way).
The book begins with a useful list of books on grief. Keefauver calls them her “Grief Guides.” Encouragingly, she includes the work of several poets. While we all struggle with the language of loss, poetry can sweep us up in memory, ritual, and sorrow. In this book, Lisa Keefauver has assimilated her guides into her own guiding voice.
Editor's note: The book contains occasional expletives.
[Reviewed in March 2025]
Reaching Back: A beloved book resurfaces in death
Reading By Moonlight: How books saved a life
Brenda Walker
Penguin Random House Australia, 2010
Ebook (Kindle), 145 pp.
MSRP: $12.99 USD, $15.99 AUD
Also available: Softcover
Editor's note: The Kindle version is the only format available outside the Australian region.
Usually, these reviews are of recent publications. This review marks the recent accidental death of the author of a book published some years ago. Brenda Walker was a revered Australian writer and academic. In the midst of a busy professional life, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. This book is an account of that time from diagnosis, through surgery, chemoradiotherapy, breast reconstruction, and survivorship. That narrative is beautifully merged with the books she read through long waiting periods during the therapies and her recovery. In essence, her intent was to guide readers who might find solace from books in times of crisis.
“This is the story of the right book, or books. We each have one life, one share of action and vision…one single life for all our speech and thought, our decent gestures and the decisions that might undo us…one life to satisfy our vast and human sense of voyaging. With the right books we find out what imaginary strangers have done with their share of this amazing thing, life.”
Her choice is selective and inviting: Walker loved novels “where dream and memory, impulse, unforeseeable events and helpless longing are part of otherwise rational lives.” Carefully, and often brilliantly, she places the prosaic next to the sublime: the daily rigor of the treatment and investigations sit next to the struggles of characters in the books and the lives of their creators. Plunging into the depths of Walker’s medical experience, the reader is suddenly pulled to the surface by her experience as an English professor, mid-lecture, considering the classics from Tolstoy to Beckett. All of this occurs with a generosity, opening up the full experience, medical or literary, made accessible and clear.
Occasionally, the choice of book is literal to the process. In the “Radiotherapy” section, Walker discusses Hiroshima by John Hersey and Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the former a description of the tragic aftereffects of radiation in war; the latter set amongst patients receiving radiation for cancer.
A remarkable coincidence is that her diagnosis occurred while writing The Wing of Night, a novel set in the First World War. Already, therefore, at the very start of her own illness, mortality, fear, and grief were her waking and dreaming thoughts. “Where once I imagined women farewelling men in uniform, now I understood that I might be forced to part unwillingly and forever from my son. I was no longer directing a story, I was within it…”
Brenda Walker survived the malignancy. She went on to write, teach, and mentor for many years. Tragically, she was struck by a car and died in late 2024. Inevitably, upon her death, people have returned to this book, arguably her most loved. Delia Falconer, a fellow writer and friend, remembers Walker’s speaking and writing voice “strikingly alike: tranquil, sharply observant, buoyed by a light sense of wonder.” Before her death, the two friends planned to travel and write together. They discussed Rome. Walker wrote to her friend:
“Keep in mind: streets lined with fruiting mandarins. An old man with a cat in a harness on a bus stop bench taking a little bottle of water from his backpack and a tin and pouring the cat a sip of water. These things are more precious than the Sistine Chapel.”
Editor’s note: In Australia, the book can be ordered via Booktopia.
[Reviewed in March 2025]
While We’re On The Topic of Australian Wordsmiths...
I'd like to share news of a beautifully written book of poems by Australian Sarah Holland-Batt. The Jaguar addresses the journey of her father from diagnosis to death from Parkinson’s disease. Metaphor and insight abound in the text, cutting through the medical reality to express the suffering that lay beneath. Deservedly, The Jaguar won the Stella Prize for the best book published by a female author in Australia in 2023.
The Jaguar was published by University of Queensland Press: ISBN 978-0702265501.
—Frank Brennan
Dr. Frank Brennan is a palliative care physician, past president of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Palliative Medicine, a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, and a lawyer.