Grief sucks, but you don't have to. Part memoir, part self-help, part choose your own grief guide; this cheeky and honest book takes a hard look at society's view of grief and flips it the bird. If you've encountered a traumatic loss (of any kind) and you want to use your experiences to make yourself better (and less bitter), then the sugar-coated platitudes everyone gives you just won't cut it. In Confessions of a Griever: Turning a Hot Mess into an Haute Message, Crystal helps readers understand: * Why you should 'Go Duck Yourself' * Why 'You Don't Get to Call her Husband an @$$hole' * Why you should 'Do More Good Sh!t' * How 'You'll Set Yourself Free' This book will help you realize that grief is grief--whatever it is and however you experience it. Everyone experiences it differently and everyone feels crazy while living through it. You're NOT crazy and your feelings ARE normal. You just need to embrace the ride and 'Remember. You're not alone.' If you're a fan of It's Ok That You're Not Ok, The Hot Young Widows Club, and The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving A F*ck then Confessions of a Griever is exactly what you've been looking for!

Grief sucks, but you don't have to. Part memoir, part self-help, part choose your own grief guide; this cheeky and honest book takes a hard look at society's view of grief and flips it the bird. If you've encountered a traumatic loss (of any kind) and you want to use your experiences to make yourself better (and less bitter), then the sugar-coated platitudes everyone gives you just won't cut it. In Confessions of a Griever: Turning a Hot Mess into an Haute Message, Crystal helps readers understand: Why you should 'Go Duck Yourself' Why 'You Don't Get to Call her Husband an @$$hole' Why you should 'Do More Good Sh!t' How 'You'll Set Yourself Free' This book will help you realize that grief is grief--however you experience it. Everyone experiences it differently and everyone feels crazy while living through it. You're NOT crazy and your feelings ARE normal. You just need to embrace the ride and 'Remember. You're not alone.'

Grief Memoirs: Cultural, Supportive, and Therapeutic Significance bridges literary studies and psychology to evaluate contemporary grief memoirs for use by bereaved and non-bereaved individuals. This volume positions the grief memoir within life writing and bereavement studies through examination of the genre’s characteristics, definitions, and functions. The book presents the views of memoirists, helping professionals, community members, and university students on writing and reading as self-expressive, self-searching, and grief-witnessing acts after the loss of a loved one. Utilizing new data from surveys assessing grief support and bibliotherapy, this text discusses the compatibility of grief memoirs with contemporary grief theories and the role of interdisciplinary methods in assisting the bereaved. Grief Memoirs: Cultural, Supportive, and Therapeutic Significance will help educators advance the understanding and interpretation of loss within psychology, literature, and medical humanities classrooms.

Focusing on the influence of the Oxford Movement on key British poets of the nineteenth-century, this book charts their ruminations on the nature of hunger, poverty and economic injustice. Exploring the works of Christina Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Adelaide Anne Procter, Alice Meynell and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Lesa Scholl examines the extent to which these poets – not all of whom were Anglo-Catholics themselves – engaged with the Tractarian social vision when grappling with issues of poverty and economic injustice in and beyond their poetic works. By engaging with economic and cultural history, as well as the sensorial materiality of poetry, Hunger, Poetry and the Oxford Movement challenges the assumption that High-Church politics were essentially conservative and removed from the social crises of the Victorian period.

Publisher description

Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear at first sight to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic, one that unravels at the centre of emotionally challenging works of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and life-writing. The book understands solace as a generative yet conflicted aspect of style, where microelements of diction, rhythm, and syntax capture consolation's alternating desirability and contestation. With a wide-angle lens on the contemporary scene, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation's kinship with ideological complaisance, superficial mitigation, or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing. Through intimate readings of novels and memoirs that explore seemingly indescribable experiences of grief, trauma, remorse, and dread, James demonstrates how they turn consolation into a condition of expressional possibility without ever promising us relief. He also supplies vital traction to current conversations about the stakes of thinking with contemporary writing to scrutinize affirmative structures of feeling, revealing unexpected common ground between the operations of literary consolation and the urgencies of cultural critique. Discrepant Solace makes the close reading of emotion crucial to understanding the work literature does in our precarious present.