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Comfort: A Journey Through Grief by Ann Hood

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Jul 08, 2008

Debra rated it:

bookshelves: craft, memoir

Read in October, 2008

After Ann Hood's five-year old daughter Grace died suddenly of a virulent strep infection, her grief was so wide and deep that she could not read or write, a state amplified by the fact that she had made her living as a novelist. This honest and touching book recounts her personal journey through that grief, from which also eventually rose her novel The Knitting Circle. "Knitting saved me," Hood writes poignantly in this memoir and anyone who works at handcrafts, particularly knitter...more After Ann Hood's five-year old daughter Grace died suddenly of a virulent strep infection, her grief was so wide and deep that she could not read or write, a state amplified by the fact that she had made her living as a novelist. This honest and touching book recounts her personal journey through that grief, from which also eventually rose her novel The Knitting Circle. "Knitting saved me," Hood writes poignantly in this memoir and anyone who works at handcrafts, particularly knitters, can appreciate how the rhythmic nature of creating something stitch by stitch can sometimes bring the hurt heart back into wholeness in a way that is beyond words.

Although I cannot claim such a seemingly unfair and untimely heartbreak as Ann Hood's loss of her beautiful daughter, I've gone through periods in my life when I was too was so stunned by sadness that I too couldn't read or write or sleep. This book rings true to me, and although I liked *The Knitting Circle* (and as a writer found it fascinating to see how Hood's life experience was transformed into two different genres), I find this memoir the superior of the two books.

I have friends that only like books with happy endings (some of them mothers who cannot bear to read tragedies involving children), and all that is fair enough, and understandable, but I've always felt that reading books written by people who have gotten through the worst life can throw at them somehow strengthens me, and brings me into a deeper experience of our common humanity. Of Hood's two books--I think of them as a diptych of grief, an altar with two sides-- The Knitting Circle covers the same ground as Comfort but with most (as I remember all) the characters finding a happy ending. The memoir, gentle readers, is more harrowing, but ultimately rich and true. In real life, Anne Hood heals...her family remains intact as it grows and changes and unexpected joys once more enter her days...but she is never the same. I think of a phrase from my younger days in church: "the fellowship of suffering." Hood herself writes honestly about her struggle finding meaning in church after Grace's death, but her book nonetheless blesses readers who, by the very act of reading, enter that deep and meaningful fellowship. In the end, Comfort expanded my mind and heart.

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Jun 25, 2009

Jennifer marked it as to-read

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May 16, 2008

Lynn McDowell marked it as to-read

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