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Reading Through Grief
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DOI：10.1080/14484528.2026.2635350.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Significant events like wars, disasters and pandemics can often lead to changes in our cultures of death, grief and mourning. As a historian interested in the history and politics of the emotions, I watched these kinds of changes unfold in the first two years of the COVID-19 Pandemic with a great deal of scholarly interest. When my friend Julie died at the end of 2021, however, I found myself living the pandemic's altered experiences of grief and mourning much more directly. This essay traces my response to this loss, and particularly the way that I turned to books by and about people who had also lost a loved one in the aftermath-the grief books, as I called them. When I began this reading I didn't imagine that it would have anything to do with my scholarly work. By the end, though, I was surprised by how much the similarities I noticed between these books-and with my own experiences of bereavement-had influenced my understandings of grief and mourning.
Keywords:
Grief
grief memoirs
bibliotherapy
history
COVID-19 Pandemic