Dear reader, pinch me (not hard), because Do Loss: A New Way to Move Through Change is released this Tuesday, March 3rd in the US, and Thursday, March 5th in the UK and Europe! Thanks for supporting my work, and if you are so inclined, purchasing Do Loss.
Also, I’ll be making a few stops around the world in the next few months! I’d love to see you in person. And if you have a fave bookstore that hosts events, let me know!
Thanks for helping to get the word out on a book that I truly believe will help us suffer less, console better, and live more vibrant lives.
“Oh my god, I’m a sicko.”
I stared at my kitchen island, covered tip to tail with close to a hundred books. Some face up. Others flopped open. A smattering of author photos staring into space from back flaps. Hardcovers, paperbacks, multi-colored sticky notes jutting from the sides like tiny Buddhist prayer flags.
Hours before, I’d started a project: assemble every book from my library that had anything to do with loss. I had taken off my shoes and climbed onto the back of my couch — one hand clutching the shelf while I leaned back like a window washer on a high rise — pulling and tossing volumes onto the cushions below. Then, armload by armload, I hauled the whole lot from my office into the kitchen, dumping them onto the island in disarray.
I paused. I gaped.
There was ten years and my entire grief education, staring me in the face. Hours of reading and crying and laughing. Of writing notes in the margins. Of talking back to authors: you’ve got to be kidding me, really? Of clapping my hand to my heart in recognition: you thought that same thing?
I buried my face in my hands. Then, I cackled like a cast member in Wicked.
If a visitor gave me the side-eye after seeing my decidedly morbid library — books on the experience of losing a spouse, but also on divorce, parent loss, job loss, pregnancy loss, identity loss, really every kind of change we don’t choose — I wouldn’t blame them. But I also wouldn’t be ashamed. These books, every one of them, were my personal research. They lit my path.
Because loss has a shape. Once you recognize it — the disorientation, the before-and-after line, the strange work of building a new normal — you see it everywhere. True, someone else’s grief for their daughter or mother or way of life wasn’t my grief. But I recognized my ache, my questions, my weird gallows humor, my fleeting rays of light inside their experiences and reflections. That’s what story does. It shows you yourself in someone else’s skin.
So here was a decade of reading. A small fortune in books. A kitchen island that could no longer fulfill its primary function as a place to eat breakfast and read the newspaper. But something was still puzzling me. How did all of this fit together? There had to be a way to make sense of it. So I sorted.
I made my own taxonomy — Classics, Encouragement, Rock Stars, Poetry, Science, Quirky, etc. And once the piles were in place, something clicked. This wasn’t just a collection of books. It was a map of how I’d found my way through. Every category represented a different kind of need, a different moment in the journey. That year I spent reading rockstar memoirs. The year I turned to science. The couple of months I didn’t resonate with anything but poetry. Together they told the story of how a person survives the unsurvivable, and eventually, tentatively, rebuilds.
Surprisingly, nearly 80% of my loss library was story. Even the science books I’d chosen had a narrative spine — researchers who understood that data lands differently when it’s wrapped in a human life. Even the books I’d filed under “encouragement” were, at their core, stories of people finding their way. When I was drowning and flailing, hoping to find something to cling to, I hadn’t reached for the proscriptive. Instead, the descriptive was my salve. It gave me companionship AND ideas to try. Two birds, one (paper-based) stone.
Today, I want to lay out some of the moments of my journey and the books that met me there. I’ve come to call the books I’m about to list the Loss Canon. They are the books I box up with a sympathy card and drop at the post office every time someone I know goes through something hard. I like to think of this like The Poetry Pharmacy — William Sieghart’s brilliant anthology built on the idea that there’s a right poem for what you’re going through right now. These books work the same way. So here’s my starting list. (Don’t worry, there are more. So. Many. More.)
A sample from the ‘Classics’: It’s the OG, of course, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking — her forensic, almost clinical examination of how her own mind behaved after suddenly losing her husband — is a book for the early but not too early days, once your brain comes back online. For when you’re trying to understand what just happened to you. For when the fog starts to thin and you want language for the thing you’ve been living.
A selection from ‘Encouragement’: Maggie Smith’s Keep Moving — a collection of small, daily encouragements born from her journey through divorce — is exactly the opposite. It’s for the morning you can barely get out of bed. Short. Direct. A hand on the shoulder.
An offering from ‘Quirky’: And then there’s Grief and Hamburgers by Stuart Ross. Yes, this is a real book. And yes, it belongs in the canon. Because some days what you need is not profundity but permission: permission to find the whole thing absurd, to laugh at the gap between how loss is supposed to look and how it actually shows up, to use silly metaphors to describe the most heartbreaking of human experiences.
The Loss Canon is not a college syllabus or a ‘best of’ book list. It’s a medicine cabinet to return to, for yourself or to hand to someone else. It made my own journey possible; just like I wouldn’t be where I am today without my kids, my family, my friends, my job, and walks in Great Falls Park, I wouldn’t be where I am today without these books.
And the book I’m publishing on Tuesday would not exist.
So as a consumer and connoisseur of the Loss Canon, I’m now adding another book to its catalog: mine. Do Loss: A New Way to Move Through Change is part memoir, part companion, part playbook: an offering of my learnings, wrapped in story. Every clue I gathered from the authors on my kitchen island mixed and mingled with my own experiences until, eventually, I knew I had to write it all down.
Do Loss doesn’t fit neatly into my Loss Canon taxonomy. Instead, it’s a combo platter of what resonated most for me in the books above: pragmatic and inspiring, humorous and earnest, encouraging and empowering. It also isn’t just about loss, but about change. Because life has a way of destabilizing us (even when it’s a change we wanted!) and after hundreds of hours of reading the stories in the Loss Canon, I wanted to share some universalities about transition that might help us land on our feet.
I’m honored to offer it to every person who can benefit from an honest conversation about the toughest parts of being human.
So whether you’re in it right now, or you’re sitting across from someone who is, feeling useless and wishing you had the right words, remember this: sometimes the thing heartbreak needs is witness and companionship. Not a five-step solution, but a story. An unpolished account of someone else being broken irreparably, and how they still somehow survived.
As I stood at my kitchen island looking at a decade of reading, what I felt — aside from the obvious questions regarding my sanity — was gratitude. These books had been there when I needed them most. They had shown me myself, and where one day I could be.
And now, along with Do Loss, I want to pass them on to you.
In awe of how loss has shaped me and my life,
P.S. The Loss Canon is an ongoing project — a curated set of books across categories: Classics, Stories, Rock Stars, Encouragement, Quirky, Fiction, Poetry, Science. As a sneak peak, below is a picture of the ‘Classics’. Stay tuned for more installments, and if a book has been a companion through your own loss, I’d love to hear about it.
I love the idea of mapping out the path of our life through the books that we've read. What a beautiful way to look at one aspect of our journey.
Just ordered my copy!! I'm so happy for you, Sue. You are going to help so many people, and myself.