American Grief in Four Stages
Book Feature - American Grief in Four Stages by Sadie Hoagland
Book Feature - American Grief in Four Stages by Sadie Hoagland
HBL Note: I’ve had two friends who were public about the grief they were experiencing as they experienced it. Both talked about how friends and family should and should not approach them when wanting to convey their love and sympathy. Both were adamant that cliches and platitudes only made their grief worse by also making them angry at the person’s inability to say something that helped or, unwittingly, say something that made them feel worse. This book, American Grief in Four Stages, discusses the grieving process through a collection of stories that explores why our culture is, by and large, unable to convey our sympathy in a meaningful way. Scroll down to read more.
Book Feature - American Grief in Four Stages by Sadie Hoagland
From the publisher:
American Grief in Four Stages is a collection of stories that imagines trauma as a space in which language fails us and narrative escapes us. These stories play with form and explore the impossibility of elegy and the inability of our culture to communicate grief, or sympathy, outside of cliché.
One narrator, for example, tries to understand her brother’s suicide by excavating his use of idioms. Other stories construe grief and trauma in much subtler ways—the passing of an era or of a daughter’s childhood, the seduction of a neighbor, the inability to have children. From a dinner party with Aztecs to an elderly shut-in’s recollection of her role in the Salem witch trials, these are stories that defy expectations and enrich the imagination. As a whole, this collection asks the reader to envisage the ways in which we suffer as both unbearably painful and unbearably American.
Book Feature - American Grief in Four Stages by Sadie Hoagland
