In What's Your Grief?, Eleanor Haley and Litsa Williams, co-founders of the popular "What's Your Grief" website, offer a practical and empathetic guide for navigating the complex terrain of grief. This book stands out for its unique format: 75 thoughtfully crafted lists that address various aspects of grief, ranging from the loss of a loved one to significant life changes like divorce or job loss. The lists cover a wide array of topics, such as "5 Little-Known Truths About Grief" and "9 Tips for Communicating What You Do (and Don’t) Need," providing readers with accessible, bite-sized insights that are easy to digest, even in the midst of emotional turmoil.

This book is an excellent resource for anyone grappling with grief, offering comfort, understanding, and practical strategies to cope with loss. Whether you're dealing with the death of a loved one or another form of loss, What's Your Grief? provides a supportive companion to help you through the challenges of grieving.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to review a temporary digital ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

REad this when I most needed it and I appreciated the authors approaches and graphs and lists and perspective,shared a lot with folks.

This is a practical helpful and empathetic book that will prove useful for anyone wanting to read about the topic of grief and loss. I liked the fact that the book covers more than the grief experienced after a bereavement. It also focusses on other losses in life such as divorce and job losses. I also liked the style of writing. It never felt heavy, complicated or patronising, choosing instead to focus on how we are all different and that our grieving process is unique despite there being shared emotions and perspectives.

I wish this book could be distributed widely as I think it provides a common sense and supportive approach to a complex emotional human experience.

This book was a really great exploration about a difficult topic to address: grief. We all grieve in different ways and different things, and so, it can be hard to understand what someone is going through and how to give advice about how to help someone get through it. This book was a very easy to follow and compassionate look at this very natural process pretty much everyone will go through at some point.

Such an essential read. As someone who was completely unprepared to grieve after a family member passed away, I have been searching for meaningful books to help me through this time. I would recommend this to anyone looking to learn more about how and why we grieve, and how to get through it.

just a book that I truly needed to read and truly great for anyone trying to heal So insanely original and creepy. Thank you to Quirk for the advanced copy

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 rounded up to 5 stars

Spoilers ahead. I will not reveal anything big - most of the review vaguely alludes to plot, structure, and characters.

---

As someone who recently suffered a very traumatic life change, this book could not have come at a better time for me. I was drawn in by the colorful cover and was so excited to see that it carried over into the contents as well. The sections were well divided and the use of colors to delineate them was genius. I was a bit wary of the idea of lists at first - because I'm someone who leans into "should" thinking - but it made the tough subject matter easily digestible and kept the books from being dense.

---

Again, thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

THIS. IS. BRILLIANT!!

This has to be the best book I have read on grief. After the loss of my brother 10 years ago, and having therapy to deal with the loss, I have been told I have 'delayed grief' so it's something that I am still struggling with, and still wanting to find the answers to.
This book may not have all the answers but my goodness, it really helps!!

The way the book is laid out, is just perfect. It's full of information, but it's split into separate short chapters, with key lists/bullet points included to make it easy to manage. When you're feeling low, the last thing you want to do do is read - and the last thing you can do is read. So the layout of this book gives you the ability to still get the reading done.

Thoroughly recommend it!

This is a wonderfully useful and instructive book, accessibly organized into (mostly) brief lists. The list structure helps keep the heavy content manageable. I found myself skipping between lists that resonated with me rather than reading each list word-by-word. This book sits in my mind next to Janine Kwoh's Welcome to the Grief Club. Kwoh's book is more accessible but packed with less science than this one. Haley and Williams impart their expert scientific knowledge, as well as their personal experiences with grief, making their book a rich and useful reference.

Wow! Not a massive reader of self help books, but found myself drawn to this in my current situation ( spouse's terminal diagnosis).
I immediately pre-ordered a hard copy, and am just frustrated that I need to wait until end of Sept! There is so much sound psychological content in this book, yet it's presented in manageable chunks and in an accessible format. The tone sits just right, acknowledging the pain of grief and providing potential ways to cope with that, whilst managing to raise the odd wry smile.
This is a book to keep a spare copy to hand, for when you meet a person who could benefit from accessing the information within. I'll be re-reading and making notes and lists of my own, and I already feel more equipped to talk about grief with others as a result of reading.

I feel like grief-related self help is so tough to read and review because grief and loss in themselves are not something you necessarily "want" to experience. This is less of a book that one might "want" to read, but for those of us living with grief, this is definitely a book you should read and will get something out of (even if it's just one list!) if you do. As someone living with grief, I did find it to be helpful, particularly the sections that encourage you to make your own lists to confront your loss, consider the ways it has affected you, and imagine ways to cope. It is always comforting to see your grief experiences reflected in others and validated with psychological and scientific reasoning, and I appreciate how the second half of the book focuses on strategies for coping and living with grief after a loss. This book reads somewhat like a textbook or workbook on grief, as the authors make use of a lot psychology / studies / research / etc. I felt like I should be taking notes and highlighting key terms! I love lists and I think the list format is specifically useful for this book as it allows you to flip through and find sections that apply to your situation depending on your mood and also and skim what might not be relevant to you currently.

I personally connected a lot with the lists relating to guilt and regret (the differences between the two, why we feel them, etc.) as well as hindsight bias and counterfactual thinking, as my family and I experienced a lot of this after my dad died. I'm really appreciative that this book introduced me to the concepts of continuing bonds and post-lost growth, both of which I strongly resonated with. I would love to own a physical copy in the future to reference and go back to, as this feels like the kind of book you can pick up from time to time, look at a list for guidance on a feeling you're having or to look at your options for coping strategies, and then put down knowing you'll come back to different parts sometime later, and maybe lend to a friend in a tough situation.

The only shortcoming this book had for me was in its attempt to be so broad as "to help you through any loss." Having lost a loved one and a beloved pet recently, I read the book through that lens. Some lists definitely felt more applicable to my experiences than others, so I wondered how much people reading from the perspective of a different sort of loss would get out of the book. The aspirations for broadness make sense, though, especially in the context of the pandemic during which almost everyone has experienced some sort of loss or grief. Also, since there are so many lists, certain ideas come up again and again and the book does start to feel repetitive at points. I would really recommend reading this book in small bits instead of all at once.

I would recommend this book specifically to someone who is moving out of the initial absolute shock and intense emotions that come with a loss and is beginning to restructure their life, perhaps wondering if the way they're experiencing grief is "normal" (for me, this would have been about 2-3 months after my dad died). Some of the lists discuss this - society often presents us with ideas of what the "right" and "wrong" ways to grieve are, which can lead one to feel isolated or misunderstood if one's grief practices don't quite measure up or tick the boxes of the well-known 5 stages. This book does a great job at introducing the psychology behind different theories of grief and helping its reader to understand different loss-related concepts, so you can begin to think about ways to live with grief without experiencing the shame or stigma of feeling that you're somehow doing it wrong.

This is a wonderful book with a friendly and supportive tone. It's clear and gives information such as various grief theories in small bites easy to take in. Passages and even chapters are brief for those who don't want to read, or think or do griefwork, too much at once. The suggestions and lists are especially excellent for helping those who are having a problem working through their grief. Highly recommended!