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.

Navigating Loss in Women's Contemporary Memoir traces the grief process through the lives of contemporary women writers to show how its complex, multi-layered nature can encourage us towards new understandings of loss.

The authors in this collection examine and critique motherhood memoir, alongside the texts of their own lives, while seeking to transform mothering practice— highlighting revolutionary praxis within books, or, when none is available, creating new visions for social change. Many essays interrogate the tensions of maternal narrative—the negotiation of the historical location of writer and readers, narrative and linguistic constraints, and the slippery ground of memory—as well as the borders constructed between the “objective” scholar and the reader who engages with and identifies with texts through her intellect and her emotional being.

New Techniques of Grief Therapy: Bereavement and Beyond expands on the mission of the previous two Techniques books, featuring innovative approaches to address the needs of those whose lives have been shadowed by loss—whether through bereavement, serious illness, the rupture of a relationship, or other complex or intangible losses, such as of an identity-defining career. The book starts with several framing chapters by prominent theorists that provide a big- picture orientation to grief work and follows with a generous toolkit of creative therapeutic techniques described in concrete detail and anchored in illustrative case studies to convey their use in actual practice. New Techniques of Grief Therapy is an indispensable resource for professionals working in hospice, hospital, palliative care, and elder care settings; clinicians in broader health-care and mental health-care practices; executive coaches; and students in the field of grief therapy.

This collection of essays presents a variety of perspectives on death and dying by scholars from different countries. The areas covered in the volume include: Conceptual, Cultural, and Gender Approaches to Death and the Deceased; Children and Death; Legal Aspects of Euthanasia and Discussion on Choices at End of Life; Palliative Care and Responsibilities and Challenges of Medical and Family Caregivers; the Aesthetic Experience of Life's End; and Modern Ways of Grieving and Commemorating the Dead.

Living with loss: From grief to wellbeing offers the latest research on adapting to and making sense of bereavement and non-death losses. It evaluates the effectiveness of a range of therapeutic approaches, including various therapeutic writing methods, that facilitate the integration of loss. Living with loss, whether through death or other causes, is one of the most challenging experiences we face. The COVID-19 pandemic had intensified the impact of these losses and increased the need for professional support and constructive therapeutic approaches. This book offers perspectives on resilience, the need for presence in bereavement, and the assessment of functional impairment following COVID-19 losses. It examines the realities of bereaved students in higher education, presents and explains compassion-focused grief therapy and meaning-focused narrative construction, and evaluates the therapeutic process of grief recovery. This volume also includes a participatory research study into the effectiveness of writing through loss and is aimed at clinicians, grief counselors, multi-disciplinary researchers, lecturers and practitioners of Writing-for-wellbeing, and will also be of value for those grieving a loved one or facing a non-death loss. The chapters in this book were originally published as two special issues in British Journal of Guidance and Counselling.

The stories of lived experience offer powerful representations of a nation’s complex and often fractured identity. Personal narratives have taken many forms in American literature. From the letters and journals of the famous and the lesser known to the memoirs of former slaves to hit true crime podcasts to lyric essays to the curated archives we keep on social media, life writing has been a tool of both the influential and the disenfranchised to spark cultural and political evolution, to help define the larger identity of the nation, and to claim a sense of belonging within it. Taken together, individual stories of real American lives weave a tapestry of history, humanity, and art while raising questions about the veracity of memory and the slippery nature of truth. This volume surveys the forms of life writing that have contributed to the richness of American literature and shaped American discourse. It examines life writing as a rhetorical tool for social change and explores how technological advancement has allowed ordinary Americans to chronicle and share their lives with others.