‘’In the dark hours between midnight and dawn, we are alone with our thoughts. This is when we best sift through our personal grief.’’

Geometry of grief is a book with a fascinating concept, written by mathematician Michael Frame. With the book, the author tries to provide the reader with parallels between geometry and grief in a hope this might help to cope with situations of severe grief.

The books starts very promising with many beautifully written description of grief and the complexity of the emotion/situation. A citation:
‘’Grief is a response to an irreversible loss. A corollary: there is no anticipatory grief. To generate grief rather than sadness, the thing lost must carry great emotional weight, and it must pull back the veil that covers a transcendent aspect of the world.’’

As a mental health professional (physician), I found this part of the book very readable and relatable, yet at the same time honest, personal and philosophical.

But than I got lost. The author writes ‘’You may feel that we’ve wondered a long way from thoughts of grief, but we haven’t.’’ I personally just couldn’t follow. The author makes extensive parallels between geometry, or more general mathematics, and patterns of a grief response. Maybe I’m just not passionate enough about maths or maybe it’s been too long since I did abstract maths myself, but I got hopelessly lost.

In the final chapters of the book the authors sums it up very well with the combination of the combination of the following two sentences:
‘’Now I don’t know if this approach will be of use to someone whose thinking is not primarily geometrical or visual’’.
And
‘’We cannot enter the personal hell of another, but we can imagine our hell if we inhabited their situation’’.

I think it’s exactly that: this book is an amazing tool for those that try to create an order into the chaos, but in the way which for many others seems very abstract: through geometry. I think I just wasn’t the right target audience, and sincerely hope this book will find the right readers. Because grief is a heartbreaking process and anyone out there struggling should be able to find a relatable tool to guide and feel less alone.

"Could the world be different than we think? Is it different? Must it be only one thing, or can it be many? If we view the world in one way, does this forever bar us from all others?"

I remember sitting in the classroom years ago and hearing over and over again 'when will I ever use maths in real life". Our teacher tried to justify these opinions with basic practical uses. In hindsight, I wish he'd thought out of the box and highlighted how maths transcends the obvious mathematical uses and actually offers a lot of covert, real-world applications.

I didn't expect such an open-minded way of thinking, challenging the reader to consider the world past the framework by which we understand it, but I appreciated the in-depth explanations and justifications behind the thought-process. Further, I enjoyed the illustrations. The book isn't the easiest read, but it's extremely interesting.

I will certainly be recommending.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!

There was lots of interesting geometry stuff in here, and I do like lots of interesting geometry stuff. There was also some good memoir and even a few tidbits of grief. The book did not really convince me of what it seemed to be trying to convince me of, namely that geometry could help with the grief process. I have no question that there is a geometry of grief, and even that Michael Frame has received some benefit in his own grief process with geometry, but the connections made in the book were a bit willowy for me. They were fun and interesting and sometimes hard enough to follow that I simply gave up trying to follow them, but I don't really care. When I read about grief I'm mostly interested in seeing how someone else covers themself in the swaddling rather than in seeing how they are going to help me with my own grief. And there is plenty of that here. My grief and experience are too disparate from Mr. Frame for it to make any sense as a frame-work (ha ha ha), but it works absolutely as a slit in the fabric of human experience through which I can empathize with his grief. And that's all I'm asking.

This is a fascinating read. To bring in references of The Simpsons, fractal geometry, chaos theory in the context of how people deal with grief is just amazing.

Frame did not convince me of the relatedness of geometry and grief, but I’d watch a dialectic about it - or his Ted talk if he gave one. The book is lovely and moving.