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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Self-help, personal development & practical advice

FOUR FUNERALS AND A WEDDING

Jill Smolowe

Resilience in a Time of Grief

Four loved ones, gone, in the space of seventeen months. Unimaginable. But as journalist Jill Smolowe buried her husband, then her sister, mother, and mother-in-law, she had no trouble imagining what would follow. Films and memoirs, after all, offer only one script for the newly widowed: you fall apart.

To Smolowe’s surprise and relief, that day never arrived. When friends insisted that her strength was “amazing,” she began to wonder if there was something freakish about her grief. Delving into modern bereavement research, she discovered a stunning bottom line: far from being uncommon, resilience like hers is the norm. In a story laced with humor, insight, and love, Smolowe finally gives voice to this silent majority. With a lens firmly trained on what helped her tolerate so much sorrow and rebound from so much loss, Smolowe jostles preconceptions about caregiving, defies clichés about grief, and offers often counterintuitive answers to those questions all of us eventually confront: What do I say? How can I help? How would I cope if it were me? Deeply moving and quietly wise, Four Funerals and a Wedding reminds us that grief is not only about endings—it’s about new beginnings. Jill Smolowe is the author of the memoir AN EMPTY LAP: ONE COUPLE’S JOURNEY TO PARENTHOOD and co-editor of the anthology A LOVE LIKE NO OTHER: STORIES FROM ADOPTIVE PARENTS. An award-winning journalist, she has been a foreign affairs writer for Time and Newsweek, and a senior writer for People, where she currently specializes in crime stories. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post Magazine, Adoptive Families and the Reader’s Digest “Today’s Best NonFiction”.

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Book Published 2014-04-08 by She Writes Press

Comments

Jill Smolowe has written a moving memoir of loss – and also a uniquely uplifting one. Emphasizing the resilience, not the grief (though she portrays both with a novelist’s eye for detail and ear for dialogue), she offers essential insights for those who have lost people they love, or know others who have, or will one day find themselves in one or the other of these positions – in other words, for every one of us. Exploding many truisms about dealing with death and illness, this book provides insight for navigating the perilous path between saying too much or too little, and concrete suggestions by which the bereaved, and those who care about them, can move beyond the ritual ‘Let me know if there is anything I can do.

Surprised by her resilience after a series of losses—including the death of her beloved husband—People writer Smolowe has written an uplifting memoir about grieving and moving on.

Many accounts of grief are called ‘brave’ and ‘unsparing,’ but FOUR FUNERALS AND A WEDDING truly is those things. It's the first account from the silent majority who respond to loss not with paralyzing sorrow but with remarkable strength. Jill Smolowe challenges orthodoxies surrounding bereavement and shows how man does not just endure, but prevails.

In sharing her story, Smolowe offers thoughtful and compassionate guidance for people going through the grieving process with loved ones. Her story is heartbreaking and heartwarming, incisively written and extremely clear. Readers will find themselves sympathetic and eager to hear how Smolowe coped with her losses and how she negotiated societal expectations of grief with grace and dignity. This is an absolute must-read for people struggling with loss.