The design and UX isn't done, Rob and Abbie, okkurrrr! 😌
danimcthomas's review against another edition
4.0
Graphic: Death of parent and Grief
scmiller's review against another edition
4.0
Graphic: Death of parent, Death, and Grief
Moderate: Kidnapping and Pandemic/Epidemic
Minor: War
jordan_noel's review against another edition
4.25
Reading it, I often felt myself distancing from Adichie’s explanation of grief. I often had very different experiences in dealing with my mother’s death and found we had very differing views of grieving and being able to continue with life.
Still, Adichie’s honest, hopeful reflections were a great comfort in grief and isolation nonetheless.
Graphic: Death of parent
Minor: War
diegor's review against another edition
5.0
Moderate: Death of parent
caoxtina's review against another edition
4.0
Graphic: Grief and Death of parent
rishireads's review against another edition
4.25
Moderate: Death of parent, Pandemic/Epidemic, and Death
hanamany's review against another edition
4.0
Moderate: Death of parent
katiemonty's review against another edition
4.75
“Grief is a cruel kind of education.”
“You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language. Why are my sides so sore and achy? It’s from crying, I’m told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is: my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth; on my chest, a heavy, awful weight; and inside my body, a sensation of eternal dissolving. My heart—my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here—is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body, of aches and lagging strength. Flesh, muscles, organs are all compromised.”
“But later it is because I want to sit alone with my grief. I want to protect—hide? hide from?—these foreign sensations, this bewildering series of hills and valleys. There is a desperation to shrug off this burden, and then a competing longing to cosset it, to hold it close. Is it possible to be possessive of one’s pain? I want to become known to it, I want it known to me.”
“Part of grief’s tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter.”
“Never” has come to stay. “Never” feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.
“I must conceal just how hard grief’s iron clamp is. I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity.”
“It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”
Graphic: Death of parent
leonormsousa's review against another edition
4.0
Moderate: Death of parent, Misogyny, Death, Grief, and Kidnapping
tatjanasbooks's review against another edition
4.75
Graphic: Death of parent, Death, and Grief
Minor: War