Six 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:

Things in Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li

Mothers who outlive their children often inhabit a world of hushed silences and euphemisms. Written in the aftermath of losing both of her teenage children to suicide, Li’s memoir strides confidently through a territory we are told to tiptoe in and fills a void of language with booming insight. A few days after James, Li’s nineteen-year-old son, took his life using the same method that his brother had six years before, the acclaimed author told a friend, half-jokingly, that she would “write a self-help book about radical acceptance.” The book she ended up writing could hardly be classified as “self-help.” As Li warns the reader early on, it “will not provide the easy satisfaction of fulfillment, inspiration, and transformation.” But these pages—refreshingly absent of platitudes, false optimism, or an ounce of self-pity—provide something far more useful: a vision of maternal grief that is both unvarnished and, ultimately, survivable.

Read about the other memoirs on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue