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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Apr 2004, 448 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2005, 360 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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Filled with laugh-out-loud humor, struggles, triumphs, and plenty of midnight trips to the fridge, Good Grief is a funny, wise, and heartbreakingly poignant novel from one of fiction's freshest and most exciting new voices.
"The funny thing about rock bottom is there's stuff underneath it. You think, This is it: I'm at the bottom now. It's all uphill from here! Then you discover the escalator goes down one more floor to another level of bargain basement junk."
GOOD GRIEF
In an age in which women are expected to be high achievers, thirty-six-year-old Sophie Stanton desperately wants to be a good widow--a graceful, composed, Jackie Kennedy kind of widow. Alas, Sophie is more of a Jack Daniels kind. Self-medicating with cartons of ice cream for breakfast, breaking down in the produce section at the supermarket, showing up to work in her bathrobe and bunny slippers--soon she's not only lost her husband, but her job, her house, and her waistline.
Desperate to reinvent her life, Sophie moves to Ashland, Oregon. But instead of the way women starting over are depicted in the movies--with heroines instantly being swept off their feet by Sam Shepard kinds of guys--Sophie finds herself in the middle of Lucy-and-Ethel madcap adventures with a darkly comic edge involving a thirteen-year-old with a fascination with fire and an alarmingly handsome actor who inspires a range of feelings she can't cope with--yet.
Filled with laugh-out-loud humor, struggles, triumphs, and plenty of midnight trips to the fridge, Good Grief is a funny, wise, and heartbreakingly poignant novel from one of fiction's freshest and most exciting new voices.
DENIAL
I
How can I be a widow? Widows wear horn-rimmed glasses and cardigan sweaters that smell like mothballs and have crepe-paper skin and names like Gladys or Midge and meet with their other widow friends once a week to play pinochle. I'm only thirty-six. I just got used to the idea of being married, only test-drove the words my husband for three years: My husband and I, my husband and I...after all that time being single!
As we go around the room introducing ourselves at the grief group, my heart drums in my chest. No wonder people fear public speaking more than death or heights or spiders. I rehearse a few lines in my head:
My name is Sophie and I live in San Jose and my husband died. No. My name is Sophie and my husband passed away of Hodgkin's disease, which is a type of cancer young adults get. Oh, but they probably already know that. This group seems up on its diseases.
A silver-haired man whose wife also died of cancer says that now when he gets up in the...
An enjoyable read, even though it did seem a little incredible that someone could go from the bottomless despair of grief to the heights of competence, and even happiness, in the timescale of the book..continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Billie Letts, author of Where The Heart Is
Lolly Winston had me from page one, really from the first paragraph...Elisabeth Kubler Ross was born in 1926 in Zurich, Switzerland and died of natural causes in 2004 in Arizona. Her ground breaking and bestselling book, On Death and Dying, (1969) did much to change the treatment of terminally ill patients. She was compelled to write it while working as a doctor in hospitals in New York, Colorado and Chicago, where she was appalled by the standard treatment for dying patients: 'They were shunned and abused; nobody was honest with them.'
Ross' five psychological stages of grief
Denial - At first, we tend to deny the loss has taken place, and may withdraw from our usual social contacts.
Anger - The grieving person may then be furious at the person who inflicted the hurt, or at the world, for letting it ...
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