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May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is marking it with a More than Enough campaign. “We want every person out there to know that if all you did was wake up today, that’s more than enough,” says NAMI. Five grieving authors below use food, art, nature and sense of place to chart intimate journeys through their shaken worlds. Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, describes both writers and readers of these insightful books when she says: “I didn’t know where I was going until I got there.” Check them out or put them on hold with your DC Public Library Card today!
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
With her last heroin hit a fresh memory, Cheryl Strayed stands alone, poorly prepared, at the edge of Mojave Desert. She has a new name, a divorce tattoo and a backpack like “a Volkswagen Beetle.” But that’s the least of her baggage. Since her mother’s cancer death, she had become “the woman with a hole in her heart.” One painful step at a time, through 1,100 miles on the Pacific Coast Trail, Strayed’s powerful memoir Wild describes how she closes that hole. She is inspiring, resourceful, determined, respected, loved and steeped in beauty. “I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside,” she writes, “like I was safe in this world, too.”
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Perhaps you wouldn’t grieve by adopting a hawk, but Helen Macdonald did. She sums up her life this way: No father, no partner, no child, no job, no home. What she has is a bond so tight with a feathery natural killing machine that she begins to lose her humanity. In this singular portrait of raw grief unleashed by the sudden death of her father, Macdonald soars through surprising terrain that includes Arthurian legend and World War II plane spotting. Therapy, medication and human connection restore her path. “The archaeology of grief is not ordered,” she writes in H is for Hawk. “It’s more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten.”
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
As a girl, Michelle Zauner would secretly dust her Korean mother’s figurines, hoping for approval that never came. She was always wrong: her posture, her skin, her clothes. The exception: food. One day her mother and aunt cooed as Zauner bit bravely into a wriggling octopus tentacle. “I came to realize that while I struggled to be good,” she writes in Crying in H Mart, “I could excel at being courageous.” This book is a feast for anyone whose family bonds over a love of food. As the popular musician grapples with grief, guilt and finality after her mother’s death, she realizes their love language of daring flavors, textures and traditions lives on through her.
All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley
With his brain “half-broken” by his revered brother Tom’s death, Patrick Bringley quits his job at the New Yorker and signs on as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He stays 10 years. The way Anthony Bourdain took us behind the scenes of luxury dining in Kitchen Confidential, All the Beauty in the World gives us a guard’s-eye-view from the depths to the rafters at one of the world’s great art museums. He mingles the beauty of its 2 million objects with meditations on life, grief and savoring our surroundings. His observations are refreshing, like defining art as “something more beautiful than it has any right to be.”
Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
What if you had a nightmare and never woke up? What if you were at a favorite resort in a national park with your husband and sons and a tsunami swept you all away? What if it snatched your parents? What if only you survived? The unthinkable happened in Sri Lanka in 2004 to economist Sonali Deriniyagala. Her shattering memoir, Wave, covers seven years, starting with the “white curl of a big wave” that transports her to a “knocked-down world” in every sense of the word. Her memories emerge slowly, painfully, until she can fully embrace her reality. “For I am without them,” she writes, “as much as I am on my own.”
About the Author
Barbara Cornell is a Library Associate at the William O. Lockridge Bellevue Neighborhood Library. She grew up in Michigan, where the public library across the street from her house was a first taste of independence. Since then, she has lived in five countries and always finds a home in books. She has two grown sons and lives with her husband in Washington, DC.
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