Comfort: A Journey Through Grief

by Ann Hood

Overview

“Rarely do memoirs of grief combine anguish, love, and fury with such elegance.” — Entertainment Weekly

In 2002, Ann Hood’s five-year-old daughter Grace died suddenly from a virulent form of strep throat. Stunned and devastated, the family searched for comfort in a time when none seemed possible. Hood—an accomplished novelist—was unable to read or write. She could only reflect on her lost daughter—“the way she looked splashing in the bathtub ... the way we sang ‘Eight Days a Week.’” One day, a friend suggested she learn to knit. Knitting soothed her and gave her something to do. Eventually, she began to read and write again. A semblance of normalcy returned, but grief, in ever new and different forms, still held the family. What they could not know was that comfort would come, and in surprising ways. Hood traces her descent into grief and reveals how she found comfort and hope again—a journey to recovery that culminates with a newly adopted daughter.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393068641
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/04/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	194
Sales rank:	776,764
File size:	196 KB

About the Author

Ann Hood is the author of a dozen books of memoir and fiction, including the best-selling novels The Book That Matters Most and The Knitting Circle, and editor of the anthologies Knitting Yarns and Knitting Pearls. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and New York.

Editorial Reviews

The first six pages of this wrenchingly honest memoir of Hood's daughter's death and its aftermath read like a tightly controlled scream. All the platitudes, the dozens of words of comfort that people offer-"time heals," "she is in a better place"-are interspersed with Hood's silent, furious responses to these "lies," with special scorn for those who say, "Are you writing this down?" The death of her five-year-old Grace in 2002 was completely unexpected: an ordinary strep throat somehow ravaged the organs of her small body. Hood (The Knitting Circle) takes readers through the slow, jagged steps of dealing with grief. Unable to write, she first took refuge in endless knitting, then got a tattoo on Grace's sixth birthday. Hiding from the Beatles' songs her daughter had loved, she found them so ubiquitous that she could finally listen only to talk radio. Grace's little shoes stood sentinel at the top of the stairs and three years passed before Hood could bear to clean her room. But there is redemption at the end of this short, anguished book. Hood and her husband have a new daughter, Annabelle, adopted from China, and at last, Hood can celebrate Mother's Day, albeit with a "strange mixture of grief and joy." (May)

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Publishers Weekly

Novelist Hood's brief, heartbreaking memoir chronicles the death of her five-year-old daughter and its soul-searing aftermath. In 2002, Grace contracted a virulent form of strep throat. A broken arm in her ballet class, a fever that seemed to come out of nowhere, a call to the pediatrician and, writes Hood, "a day and a half after I carried her into the ER, Grace died." The book opens with the author's description of the interminable hours in the hospital, watching as Grace cycled from near-comatose to "better" to dead. Though she's mined this material before in her fiction (The Knitting Circle, 2007, etc.), Hood's terror and agony are once again fresh. Watching her daughter go into cardiac arrest, she writes, "I screamed, ‘Gracie! Gracie! Gracie!' so loud and so often that my throat remained dry for days afterwards." The rest of the book delineates the process of grieving undergone by Hood, her husband and their eight-year-old son Sam. Unable to write for a time, Hood took up knitting and thought back on her life before marriage and motherhood. She had been a young woman who effortlessly left places and people behind; then she fell in love with Manhattan, and "the one place I thought for certain I would never leave was New York City." Her husband persuaded her to move to Rhode Island, but for years she felt it didn't fit. The story of how she "slowly, slowly" began to find her place in this new world is as compelling as the ghastly account of Grace's tragic end. Eventually, time started to do its healing work: Hood was again able to put words on paper, and in 2005 the family adopted a baby girl from China-born on the date Grace died. A loving tribute by turns harrowing and beautiful.

Kirkus Reviews

"In graceful prose, Comfort bears witness to the heartbreaking particularity of her—of any—loss."

People

"Comfort enriches our lives. . . . I will most likely never eat pasta with butter and Parmesan or cucumbers cut in perfect rounds . . . without thinking of Ann Hood and her daughter. And I have never met either one."

|Los Angeles Times

"Comfort is novelist Ann Hood’s utterly harrowing, completely spellbinding memoir of losing her five-year-old daughter, Grace, to a rare form of strep in 2002. . . . [A] spare, gorgeously serpentine narrative. . . . Unforgettable."

Elle

"Hood is larger than life, living, loving, and grieving on an operatic scale."

New York Times Book Review

Comfort enriches our lives. . . . I will most likely never eat pasta with butter and Parmesan or cucumbers cut in perfect rounds . . . without thinking of Ann Hood and her daughter. And I have never met either one.-- "Los Angeles Times"

Comfort is novelist Ann Hood's utterly harrowing, completely spellbinding memoir of losing her five-year-old daughter, Grace, to a rare form of strep in 2002. . . . [A] spare, gorgeously serpentine narrative. . . . Unforgettable.-- "Elle"

Hood is larger than life, living, loving, and grieving on an operatic scale.-- "New York Times Book Review"

In graceful prose, Comfort bears witness to the heartbreaking particularity of her--of any--loss.-- "People"

From the Publisher