This was a short memoir about grief, and it would have hit harder if I read this two years ago, but overall, it was a good read. I really enjoy reading books that explore complex emotions, grief being one of them. 

I read this book after I lost my mom, hoping to find some solidarity and comfort.

Reading it, I often felt myself distancing from Adichie’s explanation of grief. I often had very different experiences in dealing with my mother’s death and found we had very differing views of grieving and being able to continue with life.

Still, Adichie’s honest, hopeful reflections were a great comfort in grief and isolation nonetheless.

Semplicemente una delicatissima rappresentazione del modo in cui l'autrice ha elaborato il lutto generato dalla scomparsa del padre, una serie di pensieri scollegati che ripercorrono il suo flusso mentale in un momento difficile come quello. Eccezionale

Read on the 5th anniversary of my best friends death from suicide. I really appreciate the author declaring love for her father and being so honest about her experience with grief. Grief was very well articulated, which is hard to do. I appreciate it. There was many quotes I resonated with and wanted to list a few: 

“Grief is a cruel kind of education.”

“You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language. Why are my sides so sore and achy? It’s from crying, I’m told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is: my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth; on my chest, a heavy, awful weight; and inside my body, a sensation of eternal dissolving. My heart—my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here—is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body, of aches and lagging strength. Flesh, muscles, organs are all compromised.”


“But later it is because I want to sit alone with my grief. I want to protect—hide? hide from?—these foreign sensations, this bewildering series of hills and valleys. There is a desperation to shrug off this burden, and then a competing longing to cosset it, to hold it close. Is it possible to be possessive of one’s pain? I want to become known to it, I want it known to me.”

“Part of grief’s tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter.”

“Never” has come to stay. “Never” feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there. 

“I must conceal just how hard grief’s iron clamp is. I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity.” 

“It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”