12 Books (and a Podcast) To Get You Through Grief & Other Hardships
For folk going through hard times from dealing with life-altering grief to everyday anxiety
Those who know me on social (sara.nrtn on instagram) know I am open about:
- losing my mom slowly and painfully to terminal breast cancer 3 years ago;
- managing anxiety and depression for 10+ years;
- being an avid reader of ‘self help’ types of books
So I’m rounding up 12 of my favourite books + 1 podcast here, for folk going through hard times from dealing with life-altering grief to every day anxiety.
5 BOOKS ON GRIEF + DEATH
Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom
A true story, Morrie was Mitch’s college professor, and now he’s dying of a degenerative disease, so Mitch sits down with him each week to document his wisdom. “Take any emotion — love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back the emotions — if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them — you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.”
Option B, Sheryl Sandberg + Adam Grant
Sheryl (COO) of Facebook, chronicles the experience of losing her husband suddenly, and the year after, leaning on friend and academic Adam Grant as she learns how to build resilience and bounce back. “We plant the seeds of resilience in the ways we process negative events. After spending decades studying how people deal with setbacks, psychologist Martin Seligman found that three P’s can stunt recovery: (1) personalization — the belief that we are at fault; (2) pervasiveness — the belief that an event will affect all areas of our life; and (3) permanence — the belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever.”
Dead Moms Club, Kate Spencer
Kate Spencer, at the age of 27, lost her mom to terminal cancer. Each chapter of this book covers a unique part of the experience of losing someone close to you: the first holiday without them, the people who call to check in and the people who don’t, supporting your other not-dead parent, and more. “The idea of my mom dying and then magically shape-shifting into animal form to visit me was oddly comforting. Believing that she was simply an insect made it feel as if maybe she hadn’t really died at all. Sure she was ‘gone,’ but she was lingering, looking out, checking on me. It gave me a sliver of peace in the midst of my dark, swirling grief.”
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
Joan documents the year after losing her husband. While some of my above recommendations cover grief with humour, or intense vulnerability, I found Joan a bit cold, understandably, as there is a numbness that can come with grieving. “People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.”
What to do When I’m Gone, Suzy Hopkins & Hallie Bateman
A mother and her grown daughter write a witty graphic novel on what exactly her mom wants her to do once she’s passed. Some silly “make fajitas and whiskey,” some more serious about getting married and raising kids without your mom.
7 Books on Mental Health, Hardships, & Staying Strong
Wild, Cheryl Strayed
After losing her mom at a young age, facing divorce and having battling addiction herself, Cheryl decided to hike the 1,100-mile Pacific Crest Trail, alone. “I made it the mantra of those days; when I paused before yet another series of switchbacks or skidded down knee-jarring slopes, when patches of flesh peeled off my feet along with my socks, when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.”
tiny beautiful things, Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl was the author behind anonymous advice column called Dear Sugar. This book is a compilation of some of her best and most powerful advice to those who wrote in, those who faced a wide variety of challenges in life. Cheryl’s advice was always bold but soft, and vulnerably woven with her own stories of hardship. “Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”
milk & honey, rupi kaur
rupi’s poetry books follow a flow of highs and lows, as you can see in milk and honey’s “chapters” — the hurting, the loving, the breaking, the healing
“you look at me and cry / everything hurts / i hold you and whisper / but everything can heal”
the sun and her flowers, rupi kaur
rupi’s poetry books follow a flow of highs and lows, as you can see in the sun and her flowers “chapters” — wilting, falling, rooting, rising, blooming. “the irony of loneliness / is we all feel it / at the same time”
Tell Me More, Kelly Corrigan
In 12 short stories, Kelly tells us 12 hardest things she learned to say. “One friend told me her one big takeaway from three years and $11,000 of therapy was Learn to say no. And when you do, don’t complain and don’t explain. Every excuse you make is like an invitation to ask you again in a different way.”
Furiously Happy, Jenny Lawson
Stories about Jenny Lawson’s experience with the highs and lows of mental illness, subtitled “a funny book about horrible things.” “I’ve often thought that people with severe depression have developed such a well for experiencing extreme emotion that they might be able to experience extreme joy in a way that ‘normal’ people also might never understand, and that’s what FURIOUSLY HAPPY is all about.”
The Opposite of Loneliness, Marina Keegan
Marina was a gifted writer and Yale student when she tragically passed in a car accident. Her family and professors published this book of her short storie after her death. Many seem inspired by her own young life, of heartbreak and reflection and identity of a young woman.
“We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out — that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.”
A Podcast for Getting Through Hard Things
Honourable mention to books by Nora McInerny which I haven’t read yet but am a big fan of her podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking, on real stories of grief and hardship.
