Issue 05 — Grief
Hello from another issue of WHYRT! Thank you so much for being here and for the response to the last edition. Because of you, I found love in a hopeless place: my emails.
As mentioned in the last newsletter, a sort of liminal grief is on the docket. A living grief, as My Brilliant Friend Janine called it. Since 2020, it seems as though everyone I know has absorbed a million little catastrophes swiftly followed by a million little griefs: losses without a sizing chart, without recognizable definition. “An anonymous misery” to quote Clarice Lispector, the aforementioned patron saint of my time in this miry void.
With so many various shapes and sizes of loss and heartbreak, the ability to clearly audit their impact has become impossible. Personally, I have been holding little somber soirees for the endings in my life across the last two years or so, like a nightmare wedding season on an infinite loop in my head. Like all of you, I presumptuously presume, I have been mourning (in no particular order):
The world as I thought I knew it
Guarantees and certainty
The last of my living literary heroes
Pre-2020 definitions of normal
Barneys New York/Barney’s original jawline
My attention span and any and all perception of time
The Arclight
Ex-friends, ex-facialists, and ex-boyfriends/not-quite-boyfriends
My list of small sorrows is ever-evolving and inconclusive: the film each loss leaves behind is sebaceous. And then there are the larger, unnameable losses that can’t be inventoried – that weighed heavier and stayed longer. As a result, I have been unmoored by my many griefs over the past 3 years, yet anchored by their mundanity. I slid into this nebulous feeling without noticing the descent.
But let’s be honest, the spectrum of grief is far too nuanced for this ol’ hag to define, and in a culture that has no vocabulary or grace for loss—whether we want to or not—we do learn to live with our grief, no matter its cause, size, or form. Grief is in everything, it’s everywhere, and some may even say, it’s all at once. For something so omnipresent, it’s shocking that we still struggle to find language for it in our everyday lives. Luckily for us, novels make for impervious vessels to hold the complexities.
Below you’ll find a selection of books that helped me grieve versions of myself, friendships, limerence, heroes, frameworks now broken, memories, and even mindsets that, to quote the Love & Light crowd, no longer serve me. If speaking about grief is an act of love, then reading about it is too.
TW: some of the book recommendations below mention death and dementia.
No. 1
Goodbye, Vitamin
by Rachel Khong
What happens when shared memories can no longer be shared? When ephemerality becomes a diagnosis? Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong navigates these questions alongside forgiveness, familial devotion, and homecomings. This book is probably my most recommended IRL and a story I will return to for the rest of my days.
Breathtaking in its fragments, this bittersweet novel follows Ruth, our newly-dumped narrator, who returns home heartbroken to find her dad descending into Alzheimer’s. On the surface, Goodbye, Vitamin is about getting over a breakup and reacclimating to your family as an adult (but not quite a grown-up), but it’s also about the ideologies of recollection — how betrayal affects the clarity and the validity of our memories.
There is an obvious grief of mortality in this book, but also the mourning and realization that our parents are actually humans. Our protagonist is grieving her life as it was and what it was meant to be, while also grieving the version of her father she knew against the revelations of who he was after she left home — and also who he is becoming with his diagnosis. Within its 196 pages, Khong also illustrates what Melissa Broder brilliantly described as The Magical Daughter: the desperate desire to be the exception to our parents' humanity. There is a prolonged grief we experience as we age, if we’re lucky enough, of accepting our parents as mere mortals. This is reflected in Ruth’s evolution to the caretaker from the cared for: “Here I am, in lieu of you, collecting the moments.”
A novel made for lovers of short stories with experimental tendencies, Goodbye, Vitamin is in my professional, unsolicited opinion the ultimate cure to any reading rut. It is also a book for food lovers as Rachel Khong is the Peggy Guggenheim of eggs (and a former editor of Lucky Peach), and employs every sense in her prose. It’s also a deft examination of avoidance’s aftermath: to quote a girl from my high school’s illegally obtained foot tattoo, “Wherever You Go, There You Are...”
At the story’s center—underneath Khong’s wry wit, sharp observations, and genuinely funny tragedies—is the undervalued, tender strength of accepting people for who they are.
It’s For You If You’re For...
Aftersun (2022), bildungsromans, puella aeternas, Ruth Riechel in the 90s, breakfast for dinner, Calypso by David Sedaris, starting over, the 13th astrological sign (and 2nd pandemic): Nice Guys, Kokomo by Victoria Hannan, Alice Neel portraits, Robert Shields, and Brandon Taylor’s newsletter.
No. 2
Circle Of Friends
by Maeve Binchy
At the risk of being uncharacteristically dramatique, the omission of Maeve Binchy from the Literary Canon will be my 13th reason why. Circle Of Friends, Binchy’s most well-known novel (to everyone but me, apparently?) (Did you guys know there is a movie adaptation? Minnie Driver, Alan Cumming, Chris O'Donnell, and Colin Firth????), is one of the rare books that proficiently illustrates the pain of platonic betrayal and the absence of a friendship all while making it ok to feel adrift.
Circle of Friends follows Benny Hogan, Eve Malone, Nan Mahon, and their….circle of friends…throughout their, to use the Commonwealth parlance, uni. years in 1950s Ireland. These three women are supremely ahead of their time but still fall victim to the prevailing classism and sexism, and betray each other while coming of age. Benny, Eve, and Nan face the world’s worst first day of college, a lot of men named Sean, heartbreak, bereavement, school-organized dances, Catholic Chaos, and the consequence of some very bad decisions — not all their own. This novel is a Tolkien-style, 600-page epic (!!!) that is essentially women talking over coffee (perfection) and yet with more plot than any of those little elf books!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It is no revelation to state that friendship is not celebrated, or mourned, with the same fervor as romance. There are as many types of platonic heartbreaks as there are romantic, and yet, the loss of our friendships has never been respected with equal reverence as our romances despite sharing the same hard truth: not all relationships are built to last. No matter the context, a loss is a loss. It has to be processed, and you have to write your own set of stories that allows you to live with the absence. But the mad dash to tell the story first is only a distraction from that pain, and the process of healing—the dance of moving on gracefully (or not)—is expertly exhibited in this book.
To quote My Brilliant Friend Emma, friendship is romantic when real. Alongside the grief of friendship it deftly expresses, Circle of Friends does a rare justice to the nuance and romance of platonic friendship: the people who know you best and sometimes don’t know you at all, godsends in the form of friends. The encapsulation of, to poorly paraphrase Hilton Als, the phenomena in female friendship when there is no language, there is permission. All the memories of tender, unspoken understanding, hands squeezed under the table, and wild-eyed looks exchanged across crowded rooms, paired with the shadows of the unsaid and the constraint of being held to versions of you that you no longer are. Within the epic length of this fast-paced book is a lifelong, platonic love that illustrates the gravity friendship deserves.
Through Binchy’s signature exploration of loss, and class and gender division, this novel also explores the art of mobility: the silver lining of grief. Circle of Friends affirms that we can never return to the past but we can choose what we leave behind—and what we take with us—as we move forward.
It’s For You If You’re For...
Laurie Colwin’s novels, Saoirse Ronan directed by Greta Gerwig, “the tumbleweed stage of life”, Little Free Libraries, Bahlsen Leibniz Butter Biscuits, understated uses of taffeta, My Brilliant Friend Katie and her Brilliant Friend Serena on friend breakups (starting at the 27:27 mark), cars with salt corrosion, and the 2021 Sally Rooney Bucket Hat Bidding Wars.
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