Comfort: A Journey Through Grief (Hardcover)

by Ann Hood (Author)
Key Phrases: tall doctor, New York City, Eight Days, Mother's Day (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The first six pages of this wrenchingly honest memoir of Hood's daughter's death and its aftermath read like a tightly controlled scream. All the platitudes, the dozens of words of comfort that people offer—time heals, she is in a better place—are interspersed with Hood's silent, furious responses to these lies, with special scorn for those who say, Are you writing this down? The death of her five-year-old Grace in 2002 was completely unexpected: an ordinary strep throat somehow ravaged the organs of her small body. Hood (The Knitting Circle) takes readers through the slow, jagged steps of dealing with grief. Unable to write, she first took refuge in endless knitting, then got a tattoo on Grace's sixth birthday. Hiding from the Beatles' songs her daughter had loved, she found them so ubiquitous that she could finally listen only to talk radio. Grace's little shoes stood sentinel at the top of the stairs and three years passed before Hood could bear to clean her room. But there is redemption at the end of this short, anguished book. Hood and her husband have a new daughter, Annabelle, adopted from China, and at last, Hood can celebrate Mother's Day, albeit with a strange mixture of grief and joy. (May)
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From Booklist
How does one recover from the plenary grief of losing a precious five-year-old child? Novelist Hood’s answer is simple: one doesn’t. After her daughter died suddenly from an antibiotics-resistant strep infection, she just moved along with life, at first muddling through days and weeks of hearing but not comprehending the advice of well-meaning friends and family. Next, the grief began to shift from being her primary focus to second place, then into periodic episodes of overwhelming anguish. Hood’s sometimes-too-painful-to-read memoir bares all the raw emotions, from denial to despair to anger, that she experienced. The grief never really leaves, she says; it just stops eclipsing all else. Especially after she took up knitting, a pastime that occupied her mind in such a way that she couldn’t knit and grieve at the same time. Ultimately, she, her husband, and their son moved on and, it seems, finally found their way to a likeness of the happiness they once had. --Donna Chavez

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. (May 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393064565
• ISBN-13: 978-0393064568
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 4.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #300,725 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tear-stained hour with 'Comfort' will keep any parent straight for months. , May 23, 2008

By	Jesse Kornbluth "Head Butler" (New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"Comfort" is a very great book.

I don't think most people would read it if I paid them.

Consider: In April of 2002, Ann Hood's 5-year-old daughter spiked a fever. Rushed to the hospital, Grace was diagnosed with the kind of strep that ravages internal organs. In less than 48 hours, this sparkling, smart, cute, funny, loving girl --- a kid who embodied the entire glossary of childhood wonderfulness --- was dead.

You often hear: "There's nothing worse than burying a child."

Reading about it when the author is a master isn't much better.

Hood sugarcoats nothing. The book --- a love letter to a child forever missing --- starts with a chapter of all the things people tell grieving parents. Time heals. Give away her clothes, clean out her room. Take this drug. Have you read this? You look better.

And, because Hood had published some novels: Are you writing this down?

She does. Here. Finally. And, at the start, literally: Only the lies people tell me. There are no words for the size of this grief.

And the greatest of these lies? Time heals.

But Ann Hood doesn't heal. That's the plot of this 180-page memoir. Oh, she bought a journal, but she couldn't write, couldn't read, couldn't focus, couldn't cook, couldn't couldn't couldn't. If she didn't have a husband and a son, she might have drowned in a pool of tears.

And then there is the problem of time. Grace was so alive, she died so fast, where did she go? In memory, more real than the present, she's right here. But to step into her room, to drive past her school, to hear one of her favorite songs by The Beatles --- here come those tears again.

Someone pushes Hood to take up knitting. Well, why not? She fills a small room with yarn. And then: "I picked up my knitting needles. I cast on, counting my stitches. Then I swam, Gracie. I tried to swim to the other side of grief."

Does she make it? Well, she cooks pasta --- the shells that Gracie had loved --- and "the food did bring us comfort." There are desperate, hot, clinging nights with her husband. There is --- no surprise --- a frantic effort to get an explanation from a god who seems heartbreakingly silent. There's the graveside scene that is mercifully just a paragraph. And, though she doesn't say it here, she writes a novel, "The Knitting Circle", about a woman whose only child dies.

And then....but I don't want to spoil the ending. [If you must know, a Very Good Thing happens.] Everything changes. And then, some days, it's back to square one. "Grief doesn't have a plot," Hood writes. "It isn't smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end."

This is not an easy book to get through, and when you have, as we do, a 6-year-old girl in the next room, it's even worse. But I'm damn glad I read "Comfort". It's real and unadorned --- Ann Hood puts you in the room. This is great writing precisely because this isn't Writing, just a record of constant horror, occasional relief, and the power of time.

But enduring a book like this just for the writing --- that's for the hard-core reader. A more likely reason is that you're grieving, and you want to compare notes. Or that you're a parent, and this is your worst fear, and you can't resist finding out how grim it might be to lose a child.

As it happened, I read this book a day after our kid revealed that she was not quite the perfect goddess we had led ourselves to believe. I suspect there are a lot of parents who experience that daily. They're not disappointed with their kids, not really; they're just frazzled, beat up in their own lives, with no way to talk back to the perpetrators. And so they snap. Or get loud. Or tune out. Well, "Comfort" reminded me that we were blessed our daughter showed up here at all.

I would bet that a tear-stained hour with "Comfort" will keep any parent straight for months.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Loving Portrait of Unspeakable Grief, May 19, 2008

By	An Avid Reader (St. Cloud, MN, USA) - See all my reviews

The courage it took for author Ann Hood to put into words a wordless grief merits more than five stars. But the fact that Ms. Hood has accomplished this with complete honesty and unalterable love, using the skilled craft she has so beautifully mastered makes this little book a giant. To lose a child is the worst sorrow a parent can know, particularly when that loss is sudden. What the author does is guide the reader through her process - from the numbing shock and its devastating aftermath, how it affects her as a mother, what it means to her family, to her sense of spirituality, to her marriage, to her every day life as she knew it then and knows it now, and the reaction from friends and complete strangers. This book is a tribute to a special little girl who loved the Beatles, cucumber slices, art, and dancing. It serves as a gift to those who might have staggered under the unbearable and lonely journey through intense sorrow. Hood's honesty with her reader keeps this book on track. She offers no solutions, but she does offer hope. And she offers her readers comfort in the passage of time, in the love and support of family and friends, and a way to move forward into a different framework that contains light and love, while holding on to the memory of someone beloved. This is an incredible book. I wish Ann Hood and her family all of the best and I thank her for the heart it took to weave this book together.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Treasure to Share with a Friend in Need, May 7, 2008

By	BookWoman/BookMan TV REVIEWS (Nashville, Tn United States) - See all my reviews

Ann Hood has experienced the worst grief of all - the death of a child. Hood first shared her story of loss and redemption through her best selling novel, The Knitting Circle. Comfort - A Journey Through Grief is the true story of how Hood has mourned the death of her five year old daughter, Grace. It is a book to share with someone who needs consolation in the time of death.