Dispatches from Grief: A Mother's Journey Through the Unthinkable
Dispatches from Grief: A Mother's Journey Through the Unthinkable
Dispatches from Grief: A Mother's Journey Through the Unthinkable
Description
Description
On a February morning, Danielle Crittenden's world cleaved in two: the life before her daughter Miranda was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment, and the life after. With unflinching honesty and unexpected grace, she chronicles the shattering impact of a child's death and the strange afterlife of grief itself: how it infiltrates grocery stores and dinner parties, transforms friendships, and ultimately reshapes the mourner as fundamentally as the world.
Here is grief in all its terrible specificity: the police call that changes everything, the surreal task of choosing a burial dress, the well-meaning friends who "griefsplain." But here too is love distilled: a mother's meditation on a daughter who commanded dinner tables at twelve, who interviewed Dick Cheney with a child's notebook, who transformed into a luminous young woman living her dreams in New York. She writes of joining "the world's worst club"--parents who have lost children--and the terrible wisdom its members share.
Written with the narrative power that has made Crittenden one of our most incisive observers of family and culture, Dispatches from Grief brings a journalist's eye to the landscape of loss. For those walking through grief, for those who love someone grieving, and for all who dare imagine how precious and precarious our time together is, this book stands as both singular portrait and universal truth.
About the Author
About the Author
Danielle Crittenden is a journalist, author, and former host of the podcast The Femsplainers, known for her incisive and original commentary on women, family, and modern life. In addition to writing a popular monthly newsletter on Substack, her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and more. She is the author of four previous books, including What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, praised by Vanity Fair as the work of "one of the most important new thinkers about women and family." Born in Toronto, she now lives in Washington, D.C. and Wellington, Ontario with her husband, journalist David Frum.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"Dispatches from Grief moves with the power of a freight train over rough terrain. Danielle Crittenden makes us eyewitnesses to the hour-by-hour crawl through grief. What I will remember forever is the transformation of the griever; the steady, unpredictable process of ripping and restitching; and the resilient enormity of a mother's love...Crittenden has been through hell, but has not emerged with empty hands."
--David Brooks, New York Times columnist and bestselling author of The Second Mountain
"Danielle Crittenden has written the book on losing a child--vivid, honest, and utterly without pretense. A companion for those who grieve, and a guide for those who want to help them."
--Molly Jong-Fast, New York Times contributor and author of How to Lose Your Mother
"Danielle Crittenden's writing is spare without being stark, her story desperate without being humorless, her attitude open-hearted without being banal. She captures kaleidoscopically what was remarkable about her daughter Miranda, weaving in the exquisite and often joyous dynamics of her family. Writing this book was an act of strength...Her words ring with truth, love, clarity, and courage."
--Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon
"Many of us move through our lives thinking we know what to expect, until a plot twist changes everything. Danielle Crittenden bravely takes us into this shattering: the sudden death of her daughter Miranda at thirty-one. Dispatches from Grief is about how we find our way into this new story, not by "moving on," but by learning how to remain present when loss becomes permanent--and how honesty, rather than optimism, is what makes that endurance possible."
--Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
"Having read many books about grief, I found Danielle Crittenden's Dispatches from Grief to be something rare. After her daughter's sudden death, she writes with raw emotion and uncommon literary skill that ultimately instructs us. We take the journey from devastation to transformation alongside her, learning--and feeling--every step of the way...What this beautiful book reminds us is that bonds of love can continue forever, but in a new way. No closure required."
--Pauline Boss, Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota; author of Ambiguous Loss and The Myth of Closure
"This is a book about the worst thing that you can imagine: the death of a child. You can't prepare for it, you can't anticipate it; you can only try, afterwards, to make sense of it. Danielle Crittenden does this with grace and clarity, explaining how it is possible to go on living in an altered world. Grief is the price we pay for love, and so this is a book about love as well--how it endures, how it transforms, how it refuses to let go. Readers will find consolation, hope, and insight, as well as sadness and sorrow."
--Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag, Twilight of Democracy, and Autocracy, Inc.
"A little masterpiece. I was pulled through in one voracious sitting, moved by every line. Dispatches from Grief joins the literary canon of great books about mourning and the search for solace."
--Tina Brown, author of The Vanity Fair Diaries and The Palace Papers
"Danielle Crittenden and David Frum endured the ultimate nightmare: losing a beloved, bursting-with-life daughter. Danielle's account is unsparing, vivid, and harrowing, a mother's howl of pain that, in the final pages, mercifully reaches a kind of diminuendo and becomes a canticle of maternal love."
--Christopher Buckley, author of Thank You for Smoking and The Judge Hunter
"Stunning, beautiful, and true on every page, Dispatches from Grief takes us on a journey through the unimaginable heartbreak of a parent and a family. Nothing is sugarcoated; nothing is wished or reasoned away. And yet, what emerges is a portal into the most enduring realities of our lives--that all we really have is each other, that family is everything, and that memories sustain us. The most moving and important book I've read in years."
--Robert Kurson, New York Times bestselling author of Shadow Divers and Rocket Men
"Danielle Crittenden does something grief writers rarely do. She tells the truth. All of it. As a fellow exile in the land of grief, I found tears falling--then laughing out loud at a phrase--then that deep, coarse crying only grievers know. It was a good cry: my grief bowing to hers. Danielle has given us the gift of knowing her daughter Miranda. And then she gives us something more: how, when she was ready, she began to make Miranda's life more important than her death. Not healed. Something other. Something that inspires rather than deadens. I am grateful to Danielle and Miranda. I am grateful for this book."
--Jan Warner, author of Grief Day by Day and founder of Grief Speaks Out
"The author's pain is unvarnished--Crittenden writes about her state of shock with scant yet emotive prose...A moving and intimate expression of pain."
--Kirkus Reviews
"This beautiful book is, above all, a love story. Danielle Crittenden's undying love for her daughter lights the way through the labyrinth of grief, making it possible for the rest of us to follow her down the dark and winding paths. It's here that we come to meet a beautiful, brilliant girl named Miranda, whose memory her mother shepherds--capturing her wit and kindness and glamour, mixing touches of gentle humor with fathomless sorrow. A luminous and highly original memoir, Dispatches from Grief is also a final act of mothering."
--Abigail Tucker, New York Times bestselling author of The Lion in the Living Room and Mom Genes
--David Brooks, New York Times columnist and bestselling author of The Second Mountain
"Danielle Crittenden has written the book on losing a child--vivid, honest, and utterly without pretense. A companion for those who grieve, and a guide for those who want to help them."
--Molly Jong-Fast, New York Times contributor and author of How to Lose Your Mother
"Danielle Crittenden's writing is spare without being stark, her story desperate without being humorless, her attitude open-hearted without being banal. She captures kaleidoscopically what was remarkable about her daughter Miranda, weaving in the exquisite and often joyous dynamics of her family. Writing this book was an act of strength...Her words ring with truth, love, clarity, and courage."
--Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon
"Many of us move through our lives thinking we know what to expect, until a plot twist changes everything. Danielle Crittenden bravely takes us into this shattering: the sudden death of her daughter Miranda at thirty-one. Dispatches from Grief is about how we find our way into this new story, not by "moving on," but by learning how to remain present when loss becomes permanent--and how honesty, rather than optimism, is what makes that endurance possible."
--Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
"Having read many books about grief, I found Danielle Crittenden's Dispatches from Grief to be something rare. After her daughter's sudden death, she writes with raw emotion and uncommon literary skill that ultimately instructs us. We take the journey from devastation to transformation alongside her, learning--and feeling--every step of the way...What this beautiful book reminds us is that bonds of love can continue forever, but in a new way. No closure required."
--Pauline Boss, Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota; author of Ambiguous Loss and The Myth of Closure
"This is a book about the worst thing that you can imagine: the death of a child. You can't prepare for it, you can't anticipate it; you can only try, afterwards, to make sense of it. Danielle Crittenden does this with grace and clarity, explaining how it is possible to go on living in an altered world. Grief is the price we pay for love, and so this is a book about love as well--how it endures, how it transforms, how it refuses to let go. Readers will find consolation, hope, and insight, as well as sadness and sorrow."
--Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag, Twilight of Democracy, and Autocracy, Inc.
"A little masterpiece. I was pulled through in one voracious sitting, moved by every line. Dispatches from Grief joins the literary canon of great books about mourning and the search for solace."
--Tina Brown, author of The Vanity Fair Diaries and The Palace Papers
"Danielle Crittenden and David Frum endured the ultimate nightmare: losing a beloved, bursting-with-life daughter. Danielle's account is unsparing, vivid, and harrowing, a mother's howl of pain that, in the final pages, mercifully reaches a kind of diminuendo and becomes a canticle of maternal love."
--Christopher Buckley, author of Thank You for Smoking and The Judge Hunter
"Stunning, beautiful, and true on every page, Dispatches from Grief takes us on a journey through the unimaginable heartbreak of a parent and a family. Nothing is sugarcoated; nothing is wished or reasoned away. And yet, what emerges is a portal into the most enduring realities of our lives--that all we really have is each other, that family is everything, and that memories sustain us. The most moving and important book I've read in years."
--Robert Kurson, New York Times bestselling author of Shadow Divers and Rocket Men
"Danielle Crittenden does something grief writers rarely do. She tells the truth. All of it. As a fellow exile in the land of grief, I found tears falling--then laughing out loud at a phrase--then that deep, coarse crying only grievers know. It was a good cry: my grief bowing to hers. Danielle has given us the gift of knowing her daughter Miranda. And then she gives us something more: how, when she was ready, she began to make Miranda's life more important than her death. Not healed. Something other. Something that inspires rather than deadens. I am grateful to Danielle and Miranda. I am grateful for this book."
--Jan Warner, author of Grief Day by Day and founder of Grief Speaks Out
"The author's pain is unvarnished--Crittenden writes about her state of shock with scant yet emotive prose...A moving and intimate expression of pain."
--Kirkus Reviews
"This beautiful book is, above all, a love story. Danielle Crittenden's undying love for her daughter lights the way through the labyrinth of grief, making it possible for the rest of us to follow her down the dark and winding paths. It's here that we come to meet a beautiful, brilliant girl named Miranda, whose memory her mother shepherds--capturing her wit and kindness and glamour, mixing touches of gentle humor with fathomless sorrow. A luminous and highly original memoir, Dispatches from Grief is also a final act of mothering."
--Abigail Tucker, New York Times bestselling author of The Lion in the Living Room and Mom Genes
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Infinite Books
Pub date:
2026-05-05
Length:
208 pages
The Allstora Membership
Membership Perks:
- Save 30% on all online store purchases
- Exclusive access to author's content
- You pay less, but authors still earn double
Membership Terms:
First Month:
$0.00
Monthly price:
$5.00
- To access membership discount simply log in and add to cart, discount applied automatically.
- One month free trial, cancel anytime. Membership renews on the 15th of each month.