What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love

by Laurel Braitman

Overview

A coming-of-age memoir about the ways loss can help us transform us into the people we want to become.

“I freaking love this book. It’s about so many things, but mostly love and loss, and how you can’t let fear keep you from experiencing all the love—and pain and joy—in this glorious, heart-breaking, unpredictable world.” —Jeannette Walls, New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle, The Silver Star, and Half Broke Horses

“What Looks Like Bravery is a gorgeous, tender, and beautiful book. I’m in tears with the happy-sad truth and beauty of it. Laurel is a magnificent writer.” —Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild

Laurel Braitman spent her childhood learning from her dad how to out-fish grown men, keep bees, and fix carburetors. Diagnosed young with terminal cancer, he raced against the clock to leave her the skills she’d need to survive without him. This was one legacy. Another was relentless perfectionism and the belief that bravery meant never acknowledging your own fear.

By her mid-thirties Laurel is a bestselling author and a professor at Stanford, but emotionally, and in her personal life, she’s a ship about to splinter on the rocks. Having learned the hard way that no achievement or ambition can protect her from pain or remove the guilt and regret her dad’s death leaves her with, she determines to explore her troubled internal wilderness by way of some big exterior ones: traveling through Northern New Mexico, Western Alaska, and her Tinder app. She finds help from a wise birder in the Bering Sea, a few dozen grieving kids, and a succession of smart teachers who convince her that you cannot be brave if you’re not scared. Along the way, she faces a wildfire that threatens everyone and everything she cares about and is forced by life to say another wrenching goodbye long before she wants to. This time she may not be ready, but she’s prepared.

Joy in the wake of loss, she learns, isn’t possible despite the hardest things that happen to us, but because of the meaning we forge from them. Through her stories of loss, Laurel teaches you that these experiences of grief can actually help create space for new love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501158513
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	07/23/2024
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	927,415
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.38(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Laurel Braitman is the New York Times bestselling author of Animal Madness. She has a PhD from MIT in the history and anthropology of science and is the Director of the Writing and Storytelling Program at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Wired, and a variety of other publications. She lives between rural Alaska and her family’s citrus and avocado ranch in Southern California. She can be reached at LaurelBraitman.com.

Editorial Reviews

Evocative and clear-eyed . . . Just as Eat Pray Love and Wild inspired millions, this book will send countless readers on a different—yet no less life-changing or profound—pilgrimage, as it did for me.” —Samin Nosrat, New York Times bestselling author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

"I freaking love this book. It’s about so many things, but mostly love and loss, and how you can’t let fear keep you from experiencing all the love – and pain and joy – in this glorious, heart-breaking, unpredictable world." — Jeannette Walls, New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle, The Silver Star, and Half Broke Horses

“The best kind of breathless, propulsive, rollicking human story—it will surprise you, inspire you, break your heart, and make you laugh out loud. To say this book is impossible to put down is cliché, but true: I tore through it in one sitting. It’s a life-changing lesson in healing from loss and trauma and a master class in resilience. It couldn’t have come at a better time. —Rebecca Skloot, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“A gripping, luminous story. Braitman teaches us how to stay open to life and love in a world we can’t control, a world in which loss is inevitable but where hope springs eternal. It’s a revelatory tale about using your past to create your own beautiful future. A must-read.” —Lucy Kalanithi, MD, Stanford School of Medicine and widow of Dr. Paul Kalanithi, author of When Breath Becomes Air

“Beautiful. Laurel proves to us that home is something you carry inside of you and, in it, there is room for every feeling—the great, the bad, and the cheeky. This book will tear you apart and then put you back together again—and it will feel so good.” —BJ Miller, MD, author of A Beginner’s Guide to the End

“Gripping and gorgeous, this memoir is drawn from wisdom that only comes from life-altering loss. With breathtaking candor, Braitman sits us down by the campfire and shares a story that is relatable in its humanity but filled with the unexpected details that make for a riveting, mesmerizing tale. It made me understand my own childhood in a whole new way. What Looks Like Bravery is deeply, surprisingly healing.” —Kevin Kwan, New York Times bestselling author of Crazy Rich Asians

"Read this survivor tale. Braitman transforms a free-fall, into a soaring triumph. It’s a little slutty, a lot brilliant, and you may notice the falcon that was always there, waiting for you to look up." — Jillian Lauren, New York Times bestselling author of Some Girls, Pretty, All You Ever Wanted and more

"After a spell of world traveling, earning a doctorate, racking up honors and achievements, and, most of all, enduring the ordinary griefs of life, the author prevail[s]. One of her closing realizations is worth the cover price alone: 'There is no such thing as happily ever after. There is only happily sad or sadly happy.' An affecting investigation of loss, sorrow, and the search for meaning."—Kirkus Reviews

"An inspiring memoir...Her prose is shot through with rigor and intellectual curiosity, resulting in a candid study of one woman’s long path to emotional peace. This is perfect for anyone looking to heal a broken heart." — Publishers Weekly

"Readers struggling with grief will identify strongly with Braitman’s story."— Booklist

From the Publisher

“What Looks Like Bravery is a gorgeous, tender, and beautiful book. I'm in tears with the happy-sad truth and beauty of it. Laurel is a magnificent writer.

Cheryl Strayed

03/06/2023

In this inspiring memoir, science writer Braitman (Animal Madness) digs into her early experiences with loss to illuminate how grief shaped her well into her adulthood. Raised on an idyllic Southern California ranch populated with peacocks and burros, Braitman learned lessons of survival and courage from her father, a surgeon who died of cancer just as she was preparing for college. The author promptly put her head down and barreled through a series of academic and professional milestones until several painful losses forced her to reckon with the unspoken fears that underpinned her relationship to ambition, success, and love. “Sometimes, what looks like bravery is just us being scared of something else even more,” she writes of her eventual realization. Braitman’s experiences led her on a pilgrimage with stops at a center for grieving children, a consultation with a psychic, and a naked solo spiritual fast in New Mexico, all in service of reacquainting herself with long-buried emotions. Her prose is shot through with rigor and intellectual curiosity, resulting in a candid study of one woman’s long path to emotional peace. This is perfect for anyone looking to heal a broken heart. Agent: Barney Karpfinger, Karpfinger Agency. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Laurel Braitman has worked hard to get to a place of peace and self-awareness after years of ignoring the grief of losing her father to cancer. That knowledge imbues every word she speaks, resulting in a performance that further elevates her story. Even when she's making lousy choices and oversharing them, her authenticity draws the listener in. Braitman has a fine voice and beautiful pacing, and she captures emotional depth like a professional. Her memoir is a love letter to her parents, both of whom are quirky, loving, and resolute. As an adult, Braitman volunteers at a center for grieving children, and those children are full of wisdom. She concludes that maybe there isn't a happy-ever-after in life, but if you can get to happy-sad, that's a pretty good outcome. A.B. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

June 2023 - AudioFile

2022-12-23
Memoir of a young life punctuated by devastating grief.

“I am extraordinarily privileged in nearly every way, but what I’m most grateful for now is my parents’ belief, passed down like any other inheritance, that there’s more beauty in the world than horror.” So writes Braitman, director of the Writing and Storytelling Program at the Stanford University School of Medicine and author of Animal Madness, who experienced plenty of horror in childhood, as her father, a surgeon who wanted more than anything else to be an avocado rancher, found himself stricken with an aggressive bone cancer. It was a “death sentence in 1981,” when “chemotherapy for bone cancer was new and toxic, still in the experimental stage.” Though he outlived the odds, he eventually succumbed. Braitman writes movingly about how he kept appearing in often wonderful ways in her life, such as the bespoke stitches he left as his signature in the hearts of his patients. “The book of the heart is immortal,” she writes. “Or at least it’s longer than we think.” His death, like all deaths, was an occasion for lack of closure, and it did not help much in preparing the author for the deaths of other loved ones. There are a few unsatisfying turns as Braitman grasps for direction and love against the knowledge, hardly secret, that everyone we know will die and everything we know will disappear, but eventually she resolves herself, mostly, to that truth. Some moments are a little forced, but, after a spell of world traveling, earning a doctorate, racking up honors and achievements, and, most of all, enduring the ordinary griefs of life, the author has prevailed. One of her closing realizations is worth the cover price alone: “There is no such thing as happily ever after. There is only happily sad or sadly happy.”

An affecting investigation of loss, sorrow, and the search for meaning.

Kirkus Reviews