Tag: loss
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Tragedy and courage in memoirs
After all these years of reading memoirs, I’m deepening my understanding of the grieving subgenre, and seeing how the horror of loss leads to the wisdom of acceptance. In Losing Malcolm by Carol Henderson, the author almost goes mad. To compensate me for accompanying her to the depths, she lets me climb with her to…
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Immersed in a Memoir about Life, Love and Loss
This strange bittersweet mix of criticizing her actions and admiring her willingness to examine them provides one of the most profound gifts of reading memoirs. Rather than looking at this clumsy mothering from outside and clucking my tongue in disapproval, I’m inside her mind, with her, trying to figure it all out.
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Make sense of loss: Grieving in Memoirs
To turn this sequence into a continuous narrative, we look for lessons from other authors who have done the same thing. Here are several examples of memoirs that describe the journey of grief. Each book demonstrates how to collect the upheavals of life into the container of a story.
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Life with a famous parrot, Alex and Me by Irene Pepperberg
by Jerry Waxler I first learned about Alex while I was on a spiritual retreat in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. Our host played a video of a talking African Gray parrot named Alex. Alex’s trainer, Dr. Irene Pepperberg held a tray of objects and asked questions. For example, she asked “which square?” and the…
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