Books to Read After Losing Your Mother

January 25, 2016 1:12 PM

A friend's mother recently passed away after a fairly brief but intense battle with pancreatic cancer. My friend is the type of person who is comforted by reading about similar experiences and I think finding books about mother loss or the grief process in general might help her process some of her feelings. Please recommend any books you think could be useful, keeping in mind that her mom died only a few months ago, so it might be better to have more general books rather than intensely personal ones (although I'm not 100% sure about that).
posted by odayoday to Human Relations (26 answers total)

It relates to more the caring for and eventual loss of aging parents, but I found Roz Chast's Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? to be a great read, and I gifted a copy of it to my mother when my Grandmother passed away. Despite her general dislike of graphic novels she really enjoyed it and has mentioned buying copies for a couple of her baby-boomer aged friends since. Sorry for your friend's loss!
posted by togdon at 1:21 PM on January 25, 2016 [7 favorites]

Motherless Daughters and Grieving the Death of a Mother
posted by Elsie at 1:22 PM on January 25, 2016

I loved The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, who lost both her husband and their only daughter within 18 months of each other.
posted by triggerfinger at 1:25 PM on January 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius?
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 1:36 PM on January 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

The best book for grief work that I know of is The Grief Recovery Handbook.

Although you probably know that Wild is Cheryl Strayed's account of her life while processing the death of her mother, you might not know that she also wrote a novel on the same topic, Torch.

I have great fondness for Meghan O'Rourke -- she wrote an essay in the New Yorker several years ago that meant a lot to me on a deeply personal level. She wrote a memoir about her mother's death, called The Long Goodbye.
posted by janey47 at 1:38 PM on January 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Also, though not specifically about death, I found When Things Fall Apart to be intensely comforting and helpful during my most difficult times.
posted by triggerfinger at 1:41 PM on January 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'm not sure this title is appropriate given how fresh the loss is (and I don't know her feelings on young adult books), but A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness is a beautiful fable about a boy whose mother is dying of cancer. I happened to read it just after my best friend's mother died, and it's probably the best thing I've ever read on the process of grief.
posted by thetortoise at 1:48 PM on January 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Definitely Motherless Daughters. A therapist recommended that to me a few months after my mother passed away. It was really validating.
posted by JenMarie at 2:10 PM on January 25, 2016

After my mother died, I took "Saving Graces" by Elizabeth Edwards on a vacation and sobbed while reading it poolside (it was a good cry!). She was married to John Edwards, the senator from North Carolina who turned out to be kind of scummy but that all took place after the book. The book is more about her life, including how she coped with the death of their first son, Wade. I think that I also took some solace knowing that my mother, a great lover of books, had read the book herself but regardless, I thought it was quite moving.
posted by kat518 at 2:20 PM on January 25, 2016

Seconding The Year of Magical Thinking and When Things Fall Apart. Both were very comforting to me in different ways.

As far as general vs. personal readings go, it's hard to know...the loss is so disorienting that there aren't any universal right answers, and what's comforting one minute might be too much to handle the next. I think being open to different (perhaps unexpected) avenues for comfort is a good thing. And it's very thoughtful of you to gather these options for her!
posted by trixie119 at 2:42 PM on January 25, 2016

This might not be quite right but I read Patrick Gale's novel Notes from an Exhibition not long after my father died and found it very consoling. It's about how the family of an artist copes after her death, and deals with the ambivalence that one might feel about a lost parent very honestly, as well as the pain of loss and the frustration/isolation that comes with no-one else quite 'getting' what's going on with you.
posted by melisande at 2:53 PM on January 25, 2016

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

At age 22, Strayed had been devastated by the lung cancer death of her mother at 45. Her stepfather disengaged from Strayed's family, and her brother and sister remained distant. Strayed started using heroin, and eventually she and her husband divorced.

Seeking self-discovery and resolution of her enduring grief and personal challenges, at age 26 Strayed set out on her journey, alone and with no prior hiking experience.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 3:19 PM on January 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Anna Quindlen's One True Thing
posted by brujita at 4:02 PM on January 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

If your friend is open to poetry, Mary Szybist's Incarnadine (winner of the National Book Award a few years ago) was written during her mother's illness and death. The theme of loss is fairly subtle but it might be comforting to her.
posted by rabbitbookworm at 4:16 PM on January 25, 2016

I came on to post about Wild by Cheryl Strayed too...
posted by lgandme0717 at 4:19 PM on January 25, 2016

The Joy Luck Club is all about mother-daughter relationships, and how to bridge the unbridgeable between. If I recall correctly, it starts with a mother's death.
posted by Mchelly at 4:31 PM on January 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

H is for Hawk is about the death of Helen MacDonald's father, but it is very much about the grief process. It's also one of the most beautifully-written books I've read in the last few years.
posted by suelac at 5:08 PM on January 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

The best book I read after my mom died was The Snow Leopard.
posted by rtha at 6:06 PM on January 25, 2016

I absolutely loved The End of Your Life Book Club. It is about a man whose mother is dying, and they decide to have a two-person book club together. It is lovely.
posted by bookworm4125 at 6:23 PM on January 25, 2016

Robin Romm, The Mercy Papers
posted by listen, lady at 7:20 PM on January 25, 2016

nthing The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Another recommendation is H is for Hawk. This is also a memoir about a woman who lost her dad and is really wonderful. My condolences to your friend.....
posted by bluesky43 at 7:35 PM on January 25, 2016

If it were me whose mother had died, I might start by reading the books that SHE loved, or books about things she had seen (in a historical sense) or lived through, in an attempt to understand what she valued and how her life had been shaped.
posted by alltomorrowsparties at 8:08 PM on January 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

Not sure if this is specific enough to your needs, but Patrimony by Philip Roth is one of the best accounts of a parent passing that I've ever read.
posted by deathpanels at 9:09 PM on January 25, 2016

Slightly tangential, but Wendy McClure's The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie is framed by and partly about the death of McClure's mother and McClure's reaction to that.
posted by paduasoy at 2:14 AM on January 26, 2016

Response by poster: Thank you so much for the recommendations, everyone! I'll pass them along to my friend.
posted by odayoday at 6:33 AM on January 26, 2016

A Heartbreaking WOSG (Dave Eggers) as referenced above. Recently got on Amazon Kindle (sadly and strangely, without the edits that Eggers made in the mss after it became a hit, and without the all-important "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making" set of corrections.

Probably should read a bit before sending on to your friend. If they find funny, profane, so-awful-it's-kinda-funny material cathartic, they might enjoy it and find that it helps them. If they're looking for something more like Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul, this may be really, really bad for them.

As a general literary comment to those familiar - read when it came out in paperback, and re-read again this past week on Kindle. Lost my paperback years ago and had not re-read in more than 10 years. Still entertaining, but Eggers seems like more of an asshole than I remembered. Don't get me wrong, I'd still like to have dinner with him. :-)
posted by randomkeystrike at 6:45 AM on January 26, 2016