I discussed this book on my YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/vKgdQ2AINqI?si=MfIt-8Lsg59ZoWCT&t=45

Audio transcript:

"As I said in my Shorty September video last week, I’m not including everything I’ve read so far this month—only the books I found especially beautiful or especially interesting to talk about in some way. Today, I want to talk about a few of the contemporary and even brand-new fiction and nonfiction I’ve read this month. So, let’s get started!

"I’ll start with nonfiction. The first is On Grief by Jennifer Senior, a book about the different ways a handful of people mourned the loss of a specific young man, Bobby McIlvane who died in the bombing of the two towers on 9/11. The author’s brother was the roommate of the young man, a roommate in college and afterwards, and she talks to each of Bobby’s parents as well as to his girlfriend. This is a very short book, but it is quite powerful—partly because, at least in the author’s portrayal, Bobby is incredibly charismatic. And then because instead of just sharing the sort of mystery that Senior lays out in the early part, she really considers how the three of them mourn in such radically different ways, some embracing the pain and some pushing it aside. Their different ways of experiencing their losses often separates them, but we also start to see how they start to come together. I read this book on 9/11, which is an extremely meaningful time to read it—but that question of how differently people can approach grieving turns this into a book about something more universal than just 9/11.

A short book which looks closely at grief from the perspective of 9/11--vividly written and expertly researched. I appreciated this book's deep investigation of grief and its reverberations and ripples through so many lives.