Grief captured in effortless writing

GRIEF is the sudden kick in the stomach when you feel the air forced out of you and you struggle to breathe.

It manifests itself in the middle of the night when you’re alone with your thoughts and the only thing keeping you from scratching your eyes out is the incessant tik-tock of the alarm clock that sits on your bedside table next to the cloudy glass of water whose tepid taste engulfs your taste buds the minute you take a sip.

It’s there. It will always be there. And no matter how many times you wrap it in a little box and move it to the furthest corners of your mind, it will always reappear.

This is Casey’s life.

She’s 31, she’s a waitress drowning in a sea of college debt and she’s just lost her mother.

Finding herself in uncharted territory in a grimey pot shed, under the guise of a “garden cottage”, Casey fills her time waitressing at boujee Boston restaurant – Iris – and finishing her first novel which has taken her six years and she’s still nowhere close to completing it.

Educated and intelligent, in a parallel life Casey should be working on her second novel, living the American dream with her banker husband and negotiating her next book deal.

Instead she’s stuck in an emotional rut. She’s just lost her mother and after coming out of a toxic love affair, to say she is broken is an understatement.

She is beyond repair. To make things worse, instead of dealing with the grief of her mother’s sudden death, she starts a relationship with a best-selling writer.

Big mistake.

She finds herself drawn to the stable family life she so earnestly craves and gravitates towards his two sons. It’s a promise of a life that could have been hers.

And instead of finishing her great American novel, she becomes easily distracted by events and interests that pull her deeper into that dark hole called grief.

US writer Lily King is the author of five award-winning novels, including

Writers & Lovers which made the New York Times bestseller list. It’s not hard to see why.

King is a wordsmith that captivates her reader with her beautiful use of the English language. It’s the way she describes places, events and emotions that make you feel part of the narrative.

In this novel, she takes the subject of grief and makes it a tangible emotion, something you can touch, smell and see. So very often, it’s difficult to describe feelings of hurt and loss, but King gets it. She knows what true loss really means. And it translates into her writing which is captivating and emotive.

There are many elements to this book. King uses Casey as the vessel which encompasses all these emotions, making her a relatable character.

We’re introduced to other characters like Oscar, Silas and Luke, but King firmly puts the emphasis on Casey. There were moments in Writers &

Lovers that triggered certain emotions in me. At times it was hard to read. And yet, I couldn’t put it down.

I suppose each of us can relate to aspects of Casey’s life. The pain of losing someone in your heart can do that, especially if it’s still raw.

That’s the beauty of this book. It can act as some sort of catharsis or it can just be a very good read, although a melancholy one.