A review by liralen
It's Okay to Laugh by Nora McInerny Purmort, Nora McInerny Purmort

4.0

It is wrong to try on this fictitious sorrow for size when Aaron is sleeping beside me, and I drag myself from this imaginary hell into the real and present one in front of me. ... You cannot do that again, I tell myself. You cannot bury the man you love while he is still alive. (12)

For such dark topics—miscarriage and cancer and death—Purmort strikes a wonderful balance of tones here: grieving, yes, but also funny and snarky and self-aware.

I think I would have preferred this as a single, cohesive narrative over the essay format that it's in, but I can't complain too much because the essay format ended up serving me well—I started reading but then took a long break to read a whole bunch of other things (and do things like start to learn German and do piles of work and make/execute impractical winter plans and so on and so forth) before finishing, but essays made it easier to pick right back up where I'd left off.

I've never been married and never been pregnant/had kids and never suffered the sort of losses that Purmort talks about here, but, I don't know. It's blunt and honest enough to reach a far broader audience than it might. Not all funny and not all serious, and a wonderfully accessible addition to the...how do I put this? to the hard-topics literature.