In 2016, on my first research leave, I embarked on my current book project, Visualizing Grief: An Aesthetics of Assembly. I read dozens of books—prose memoirs, graphic narratives and comics, and poetry—about the experience of losing a loved one, and its aftermath. And I found that the portrayal of grief as multi-layered or dyadic comes up regularly in contemporary narratives. That is, the sufferer must endure not only her loss but also the burden of emotions and thoughts tied to the social and relational aspects of grieving. The grieving individual, inevitably interacting with close and distant others who often don’t know what to say to her or how to respond to her in her state of sadness and loss, is left even more alone in the loneliness of her grief. In this doubled state of isolation and despair, she feels cast out. Or, as Roland Barthes nimbly puts it, “abandonitis.”
Contemporary grief memoirs can be traced back to three key mid-twentieth century works: John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud (1949), C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1960), and Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death (1964). Today, more than dozens are published annually, with many attracting wide audiences. What is often emphasized in critical responses to such literature is how these books are meant to help either readers or writers cope with experiences of loss and fears about the inevitability of death. Though these are important points, they also, however tacitly, promote a limited, individualistic approach to thinking about how grief impacts people and the roles it plays in our lives.
In Visualizing Grief, I am interested in what I have determined to be a key motivation behind the creation and publication of these books. I describe it as the ways in which many of them, whether implicitly or explicitly, can teach readers how to carefully pay attention to those around them living in grief. This means actively approaching others who are in pain, without causing additional undue harm by, for instance, tiptoeing around their painful experiences or unduly burdening them in their most vulnerable moments with the non-grieving person’s own fears and anxieties. I use visualization as a structuring device to think about what it means to pay attention, to assemble in and around loss, given how, as I have seen in the literature, experiences of grief are so often signposted in and through images and the visual—what is, or what is not, seen.
My book focuses on 21st century memoirists who emphasize the connective, and combinational, elements of loss and its attendant grief. By this I mean, the ways in which each experience of loss builds on and from another or others; how the aftermath to a loss cannot be readily sequestered, either in relation to other individual, previous, or coincident experiences of loss or in relation to the broader, communal forces and factors that impress on and move us in our grief. The memoirs I write about include works by prose writers Joan Didion, Yiyun Li, Helen MacDonald, Jeannie Vanasco, and Jesmyn Ward, as well as cartoonists, illustrators, and visual artists Roz Chast, Karen Green, and Elizabeth Swados, and poets Maggie Nelson and Natasha Tretheway. I argue that these texts respond, directly and indirectly, to late twentieth and early twenty-first century revisionist beliefs and practices about what it means to grieve. They are also a product of related “death positive” movements, which largely originated in the 1960s and have now gained increasing footholds in our contemporary moment, as people more urgently recognize the need for public, and communal, spaces for grieving.
By narrowing in on various practices of assembly—of gathering people, ideas, words, and images together, of creating a composite out of various parts—in my book I establish readings that, rather than furthering isolations that stem from loss, instead foster modes of connection and attention.