This book was absolutely beautifully written straight from the heart and I'm so grateful to Netgalley and to Source books for the opportunity of reading an advanced copy.
The book was about baby Alex, Clare's twin baby boy who sadly passed and she discussed grief through 18 chapters.
I too lost a twin, then my husband and my parents within 8 months of each other and my in laws within the same year. I didn't have time to grieve, I had work and 2 children under 2 to bring up. My children are now 30 and 29 and I grieve every now and again especially at Christmas.
This book has really helped me to grieve, to give me that space after all these years, to allow myself to take time out and be selfish.
I wish this book had been around 29 years ago.
Thank you Clare, this will help so many people, who are unable to see how or what next to say or feel.
We are human, we are all different, we all suffer loss at some point in our lives.
This book will be able to help people take small steps towards healing.

This was not as sad as I expected! It was basically a memoir of her losing her son with some ways to extrapolate from her experience how deal with loss in your own life. I think if you thought it was going to be a real solid self help book you’d be disappointed but I like this method better. She’s good at sharing details without it being maudlin or self pitying.

<i>'Sometimes it's too painful to be alive, isn't it?'</i>

'Not my cup of tea.' 'Not for me.' 'Not interested.' When you're vulnerable, reaching out to express your pain, your rage, your grief, is a risk. You risk people's pity, their misunderstanding, their dismissal or disbelief, their ire and their abandonment. I think many people fear being contaminated by grief, so they keep their distance or dampen their empathy. No one wants to welcome the ghost into their home. It's so much easier to look away, or pretend you don't notice, when you're not the one who needs help. Perhaps I'm not the target audience of this book, in that I'm still alive, but even so, I'm grieving for the small child I once was, years ago; the safety I never experienced; the trust of adults who hurt and exploited me when they should have been the ones to protect me; the decades I lost to abuse and addiction; the potential lives I could have brought into the world, if I had a choice, if my body hadn't been raped while it was still only beginning to grow.

Grief is an achingly lonely experience, and Clare Mackintosh captures that endless isolation perfectly in <i>I Promise It Won't Always Hurt Like This</i>. I particularly appreciated her emphasis on the state of permanently simmering anger that ends in eruptions of rage, only to build once more, never satisfied - and how the bitterness of grief can turn you against everyone and everything, including yourself, until you feel yourself rotting away from the inside out. I also related to her descriptions of feeling pressured to silence oneself or minimise your own experience in order to protect the sensibilities of others, or out of a sense of not wanting to hurt them or push them even further away, which is only a deeper betrayal of self. I liked that she took pains to point out that grief is inherently selfish, and must be allowed to be so, until one begins to surface and function as something close to human.

I'm sure this book 'won't be for everyone', and nor should it be. For those who will gain something, however, those gains may well be significant. (The front cover is beautiful, by the way - sea blue with yellow daffodils).

I am grateful to have received an ARC of this book from Sourcebooks via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Thank you NetGalley and publisher for this ARC.

This book had me hooked from page one! It’s so heartbreaking yet so good. I loved it. Such a good story.

Wow. What a heartbreaking and hopeful story. Clare is a wonderful storyteller and I've read her books before. This was a unique style of work. I appreciated the raw words and how authentic the book was. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. Five stars.