Why We Write About Grief

By JOYCE CAROL OATES and MEGHAN O’ROURKE

New York Times, February 26, 2011

Grieving has always been a public as well as private act, and lately, it seems, people are increasingly writing memoirs about it.

Two new first-person accounts about coping with the loss of a loved one are Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Widow’s Story,” about the death of her husband, Raymond Smith, (published earlier this month), and Meghan O’Rourke’s “The Long Goodbye,” about mourning her mother (to be published in April).

Their books add to a growing genre that includes Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), David Rieff’s “Swimming in a Sea of Death” (2008), Anne Roiphe’s “Epilogue” (2008) and Roland Barthes’s posthumous “Mourning Diary” (2010), to name a few recent examples.

In an e-mail conversation, Ms. Oates and Ms. O’Rourke discussed how they wrote about their own grief and why the literature of loss resonates with readers today. The dialog, which has been edited for length and clarity, began by asking them what led them to write about their experiences.

Read their conversation at The New York Times.