Grief Works

by Julia Samuel Penguin 304pp £14.99 The Week Bookshop £12.99

“The Victorians were terrible at sex, but good at death and dying,” said Helen Davies in The Sunday Times. “We are the other way round.” In Grief Works, the psychologist and bereavement counsellor Julia Samuel (pictured) has “distilled the wisdom of her 25-year career” to create a “rigorous” study of the grieving process that doubles as an unusually “profound” self-help book. Samuel’s central message is that “grief takes time”, said Cressida Connolly in The Spectator. It’s something that cannot be circumvented: “you have to go through it to get out the other side”. At least 15% of all psychological disorders, it has been estimated, have unresolved grief as their source (and it’s “surely at the root of countless cases of insomnia and alcoholism besides”). All the same, some things do make a difference, and “what seems to help the most is allowing the bereaved to talk”. Among the various tips that Samuel offers to friends of the grieving are: do practical things, such as taking round food; be persistent, as “grief can manifest as grumpiness”; and “don’t tell them to buck up and get over it”.

Grief, Samuel writes, is the antithesis of our culture’s belief that “we can fix just about anything and make it better”. Paradoxically, it is this insistence on acknowledging “what cannot be fixed” that gives her book a “real chance of helping”, said Kate Kellaway in The Observer. “She does not – hurrah! – believe in ‘closure’. Nor does she feel denial is always unhelpful.” I have just one quibble with this “indispensable survey”: Samuel was born into the Guinness family, and was a friend of Princess Diana. Understandably, she doesn’t play up her connections, but it would have been “fascinating” to get her view on the “national outpouring of grief (if that is what it was) after Diana’s death”.