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3.84 AVERAGE
3.84 AVERAGE
emotional
sad
slow-paced
Not giving a rating because I don’t want to rate someone’s traumatic experience but this memoir just didn’t really work for me outside the first and last chapters. I’m glad she’s doing better now
5 word summary: Losing your whole family sucks. I have nothing but admiration and compassion for Sonali Deranyagali, but there's just not enough here to make an engaging book. Great survival stories need at least one of these elements: a dramatic struggle against the elements, or a life changing spiritual/philosophical reawakening. This has neither: the author survived purely by chance, and her path to healing contains no particular revelations. While this is probably realistic, it's simply not interesting.
This memoir is about the author's loss, in the tsunami of 2004 in Sri Lanka, her husband, two sons, and parents. Her grief is mighty. It's a rage. An anguish. She doesn't grieve with grace, as most do, but with a long lasting bitterness and passion, the intensity of which only diminishes after the passage of seven years bring a sort of acceptance and recognition.
This is not an easy book to read. Oh, stylistically, it's easy. But emotionally, it's hard going.
As to what I liked about the book, I preferred the distractions from the torment. The descriptions of Sri Lankan cuisine. The cultural difference between the author's wealthy Sri Lankan upbringing and her husband's working class English background. And how the boys proudly straddled the two cultures. The descriptions of the wildlife that the author's son Vik took such delight in. The use of the author's extensive world travel as backdrop to her working through her pain.
This is not an easy book to read. Oh, stylistically, it's easy. But emotionally, it's hard going.
As to what I liked about the book, I preferred the distractions from the torment. The descriptions of Sri Lankan cuisine. The cultural difference between the author's wealthy Sri Lankan upbringing and her husband's working class English background. And how the boys proudly straddled the two cultures. The descriptions of the wildlife that the author's son Vik took such delight in. The use of the author's extensive world travel as backdrop to her working through her pain.
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Death, Suicidal thoughts, Grief
Moderate: Death of parent, Alcohol
Minor: Fatphobia, Infidelity, Panic attacks/disorders, Stalking
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
restraint yet devastating
Finished reading this just before the ninth anniversary of the boxing day tsunami. Possibly one of the best books ever written about coping with grief and pain.
dark
fast-paced
I went into the book with high expectations for some reason, expectations is a bit of exaggeration but I did think that it would hit close to home for some personal reason and the book was…….hmm I don’t know how to exactly put it.
The book was powerful as you would expect it with content like this, the author was brave in writing this and us readers couldn’t fathom the amount of struggle and liberation writing this would have caused here because most of us haven’t been in her shoes and so kudos to her.
Secondly one thing that I really like about this book was honest portrayal of grief, mostly when people write a book about grief, their personal experience with it, I have found them to be a bit too quick to get to the “how to process the grief” part, the book usually starts with the demise and then few paragraphs about how bad and hopeless and angry they felt but soon they start to talk about how grateful they are for the supper they had and it delves into cliches (not necessarily untrue or bad) like “I have learned that we the living are burdened with the sweet duty of carrying on the memories of those person who had departed from us, they aren’t dead completely till we keep them alive in our minds and lives”, so it reads like a self help book more often than not. I can sort of see why they would write it like that because mostly people reading it don’t want to read someone go on for pages and pages about them rotting on bed and stuffs but that doesn’t ring true for me because grief is messy, it isn’t pretty and it sucks, people process it very differently (which is why any criticism about this book is only from a reader point of view) but this book was direct and true.
There are few passages where the author sounds rude and disrespectful and idiotic, there is a scene where a kid rescued from the hurricane is sitting next to her but instead of extending sympathy she is thinking “you only survived because you’re fat but my kids were skinny, how would they have survived”, it sounds shocking, obscene but that’s also the truth, in hard situations like that we indeed turn bitter even to good people in our life who wants to help us, we lash out at them saying “well it’s not you who lost your loved ones”, even with years the pain was dulled but she never really gets past it because there usually is not straightforward getting over it, it’s not a bruise or scar to simply get over and so I liked how the author dealt with the subject with an unflinching attitude.
But overall I didn’t really like the book, it was too verbose for my liking and the author did come across as unpleasant (and rightfully so at times), and I was hardly about to be relate with her rich upbringing and stuffs and so there was a disconnect as a reader. Let me show you an example of the too wordy passage :
“Last evening I walked downtown along the Hudson at sunset, as I often do. I stopped on the boardwalk on Pier 46 to watch the orange light. There was a canopy of hysterical gulls over my head, the birds were spinning and swerving, no end to their agitation, it seemed. And standing there, I could enter another vista, see another river. The four of us on a Saturday afternoon at Butler’s Wharf, by the Thames. I am impatient, shooing along the boys who are dillydallying in the drizzle because they think Tower Bridge is about to open, any minute now.”
Like who even uses dillydallying!? Her experiences is posh places and her upbringing was read by me with a detached sense, as if I’m reading some piece of news of economics that I am not particularly interested about, so yeah not my cup of tea.
Rating 2.3/5.0
The book was powerful as you would expect it with content like this, the author was brave in writing this and us readers couldn’t fathom the amount of struggle and liberation writing this would have caused here because most of us haven’t been in her shoes and so kudos to her.
Secondly one thing that I really like about this book was honest portrayal of grief, mostly when people write a book about grief, their personal experience with it, I have found them to be a bit too quick to get to the “how to process the grief” part, the book usually starts with the demise and then few paragraphs about how bad and hopeless and angry they felt but soon they start to talk about how grateful they are for the supper they had and it delves into cliches (not necessarily untrue or bad) like “I have learned that we the living are burdened with the sweet duty of carrying on the memories of those person who had departed from us, they aren’t dead completely till we keep them alive in our minds and lives”, so it reads like a self help book more often than not. I can sort of see why they would write it like that because mostly people reading it don’t want to read someone go on for pages and pages about them rotting on bed and stuffs but that doesn’t ring true for me because grief is messy, it isn’t pretty and it sucks, people process it very differently (which is why any criticism about this book is only from a reader point of view) but this book was direct and true.
There are few passages where the author sounds rude and disrespectful and idiotic, there is a scene where a kid rescued from the hurricane is sitting next to her but instead of extending sympathy she is thinking “you only survived because you’re fat but my kids were skinny, how would they have survived”, it sounds shocking, obscene but that’s also the truth, in hard situations like that we indeed turn bitter even to good people in our life who wants to help us, we lash out at them saying “well it’s not you who lost your loved ones”, even with years the pain was dulled but she never really gets past it because there usually is not straightforward getting over it, it’s not a bruise or scar to simply get over and so I liked how the author dealt with the subject with an unflinching attitude.
But overall I didn’t really like the book, it was too verbose for my liking and the author did come across as unpleasant (and rightfully so at times), and I was hardly about to be relate with her rich upbringing and stuffs and so there was a disconnect as a reader. Let me show you an example of the too wordy passage :
“Last evening I walked downtown along the Hudson at sunset, as I often do. I stopped on the boardwalk on Pier 46 to watch the orange light. There was a canopy of hysterical gulls over my head, the birds were spinning and swerving, no end to their agitation, it seemed. And standing there, I could enter another vista, see another river. The four of us on a Saturday afternoon at Butler’s Wharf, by the Thames. I am impatient, shooing along the boys who are dillydallying in the drizzle because they think Tower Bridge is about to open, any minute now.”
Like who even uses dillydallying!? Her experiences is posh places and her upbringing was read by me with a detached sense, as if I’m reading some piece of news of economics that I am not particularly interested about, so yeah not my cup of tea.
Rating 2.3/5.0
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
I don’t feel that it’s fair for me to be scoring someone’s experience, especially an experience as devastating as this. My rating is more in regards to how I felt while reading the memoir. It felt very dragging and hopeless, which i’m guessing is how the author felt as she was trying to survive through the pain of her loss. I think in most memoirs with loss there is more of an evolution of feeling as the person moves on, but in this case the author felt very stagnant in her progression recovering. Maybe this is just not something that can be recovered from.
Honest, raw, and astoundingly beautiful. Sparkling. Haunting. I will be recommending this to nearly everyone I know.