You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A gut-punch of a book, chronicling the aftermath of the author's near-instantaneous loss of her two young sons, husband and parents during the tsunami of 2004.
I was disappointed by the New York Times review because I thought I was going to make such a well-played point about bravery... and there Cheryl Strayed went and made a similar point on her slightly larger platform. The nerve. Anyway: I, too, think the word "bravery" is thrown around in tragedy. In a literary sense, one of the bravest things an author can do is force readers to confront the uncomfortable, or to admit to darkness that we'd normally bury or obfuscate. Deraniyagala holds nothing back. She makes no effort to cast herself as a heroine or a sympathetic striver. She doesn't overwrite or chase the poetry of misery.
It makes perfect sense that Joan Didion would be the lead blurb on the back cover ("An amazing, beautiful book"). Personally, I found Deraniyagala's book even more affecting than [b:The Year of Magical Thinking|7815|The Year of Magical Thinking|Joan Didion|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327878638s/7815.jpg|1659905] or [b:Blue Nights|10252302|Blue Nights|Joan Didion|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1319148558s/10252302.jpg|15152485].
Loving the book is obviously a subjective sort of thing, but the dregs of the book reading community are the people who leave one-star reviews because they have such all-encompassing disdain for financially privileged families that it suffocates their empathy... or because they play armchair quarterback and decide that THEY would have somehow responded "better" in the aftermath of losing the five most important people in their lives while almost dying themselves... or, perhaps most grating of all, because they wanted Deraniyagala to "get on with it" or become a grief counselor and help other parents and/or fall in love and "today is the first day of the rest of my life - THE END!"
It doesn't always work like that. There are powerful moments of healing as the author reconnects to her past, but it's far from a tidy tale of grief rehab.
The horror isn't just the immediate aftermath when you're wailing inconsolably around the clock. The horror is the fifth year when a stray item of clothing or forgotten song or fleeting memory destroys you all over again.
I'm not sure I've ever read a book that drives that point home so clearly.
I was disappointed by the New York Times review because I thought I was going to make such a well-played point about bravery... and there Cheryl Strayed went and made a similar point on her slightly larger platform. The nerve. Anyway: I, too, think the word "bravery" is thrown around in tragedy. In a literary sense, one of the bravest things an author can do is force readers to confront the uncomfortable, or to admit to darkness that we'd normally bury or obfuscate. Deraniyagala holds nothing back. She makes no effort to cast herself as a heroine or a sympathetic striver. She doesn't overwrite or chase the poetry of misery.
It makes perfect sense that Joan Didion would be the lead blurb on the back cover ("An amazing, beautiful book"). Personally, I found Deraniyagala's book even more affecting than [b:The Year of Magical Thinking|7815|The Year of Magical Thinking|Joan Didion|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327878638s/7815.jpg|1659905] or [b:Blue Nights|10252302|Blue Nights|Joan Didion|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1319148558s/10252302.jpg|15152485].
Loving the book is obviously a subjective sort of thing, but the dregs of the book reading community are the people who leave one-star reviews because they have such all-encompassing disdain for financially privileged families that it suffocates their empathy... or because they play armchair quarterback and decide that THEY would have somehow responded "better" in the aftermath of losing the five most important people in their lives while almost dying themselves... or, perhaps most grating of all, because they wanted Deraniyagala to "get on with it" or become a grief counselor and help other parents and/or fall in love and "today is the first day of the rest of my life - THE END!"
It doesn't always work like that. There are powerful moments of healing as the author reconnects to her past, but it's far from a tidy tale of grief rehab.
The horror isn't just the immediate aftermath when you're wailing inconsolably around the clock. The horror is the fifth year when a stray item of clothing or forgotten song or fleeting memory destroys you all over again.
I'm not sure I've ever read a book that drives that point home so clearly.