Six top memoirs that make grief feel less lonely

Charley Burlock is the Books Editor at Oprah Daily where she writes, edits, and assigns stories on all things literary. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from NYU, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. Her work has been featured in the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, the Apple News Today podcast, and elsewhere.

At Oprah Daily Burlock tagged "six memoirs that make grief feel a tiny bit less lonely," including:

Memorial Days, by Geraldine Brooks

On Memorial Day 2019, while Brooks was in the throes of writing her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Horse, her vibrant, healthy sixty-year-old husband collapsed on a D.C. sidewalk and died. Flashing between the chaotic immediate wake of Tony’s heart attack and the meditative “memorial days” she gave herself four years later to “do the unfinished work of grieving” on Australia’s Flinders Island, Brooks unspools a pulse-quickening love story woven within a sharp-toothed indictment of “the brutal bureaucracy of death.” While there is no shortage of moving grief memoirs, there are vanishingly few that offer bereaved readers more than a mirror to their own experience. In addition to gorgeously evoking the man she lost and the pain he left, Brooks gives practical guidance for tending to that pain and preparing in advance for a legal and logistical obstacle course that few know to train for.

Read about another memoir on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue