Infinite Books recently published Dispatches from Grief: A Mother's Journey Through the Unthinkable, the new memoir by journalist and author Danielle Crittenden. The book is an account of the sudden death of her thirty-two-year-old daughter, Miranda Frum, who was found in her Brooklyn apartment on a February morning.
Dispatches from Grief is the rare memoir of loss that refuses easy comfort. With precision, restraint, and unexpected humor, Crittenden traces the strange afterlife of grief: the friends who disappear, the well-meaning consolations that wound, the routines that no longer hold, and the slow work of carrying a daughter's memory forward. The result is a book that earns its place beside the canonical works of mourning.
Indigo Chapters, Canada's largest bookseller, has selected Dispatches from Grief as a Heather's Pick, an honor reserved for titles personally chosen and championed by Indigo founder Heather Reisman. The Atlantic published an excerpt, "On Losing a Daughter," in its May issue, and the book has drawn early praise from David Brooks, Anne Applebaum, Tina Brown, Andrew Solomon, Lori Gottlieb, Christopher Buckley, and Pauline Boss, among others.
"Danielle wrote Dispatches through the worst thing that can happen to a parent, and she wrote it without flinching and without false comfort," said Jimmy Soni, Editor-in-chief of Infinite Books. "I have never seen readers respond to one the way they are responding to this. People who have lost children. People who love someone who has. People who simply recognize the truth when they see it on a page. They tell us, again and again, that Danielle has named something they thought could not be named. That is the highest thing a book can do, and Danielle has done it."
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