Grieving In Silence Is Killing Us. What If Books Could Fill That Void?

The idea for my book, The Last Poem, started while I was listening. At an event hosted for me in New York, people had gathered for a casual afternoon, less sit-down, more mingle. Small clusters of strangers moved around the room, drifting between conversations and the food table. I was there as the author, but also as an observer, doing what most writers do: collecting the feeling in the room. I could hear snippets of how my poetry books had touched them.

"I read this after a horrible breakup."
"This got me through such a dark time."
"I highlighted so many lines in this…"
"I bought this for my mum after her friend died."

None of these people knew each other. Different ages, backgrounds, occupations, life experiences. People who would likely never cross paths in daily life. And yet there they were, bonding over what they'd felt while reading poetry, as if it was some kind of shared language. It struck me that we weren't connected because our stories were the same. We were connected because our feelings were.

I've been writing poetry for years, long enough to know that grief isn't rare. I've always believed it matters to share your grief, to name it, to talk about it, to learn from it rather than pretend it isn't there. Grief is one of the most human things we do. Love is intrinsically universal, so the pain, or the absence of it, must be too. But in that room, something shifted for me. I realised grief doesn't only connect us when we sit down and introduce ourselves, it also connects us through stories. I could see that connection happening right there in front of me, but I kept thinking about the people who weren't in the room at all. The ones grieving alone; that thought became the seed of my book.

There is something profoundly intimate about reading. It's often solitary, just you and the story, but it's never truly solitary. When you read, you're being accompanied by characters, a world, a voice. And for someone who is grieving, that matters. Because so often grief can make you feel like a burden. It can make you feel like your sadness is too much for other people to hold, or like there's a timeline to adhere to, a checklist to tick off until you're "better". Like your loss has made you "too much" in a world that likes everything tidy. But a book often says, here is a mirror. Here is validation that what you are feeling exists outside of you.

When you're grieving, people often want you to talk. They ask, "How are you?" They want to support you, and that kindness usually comes from a well-intended place, but sometimes it can also feel like pressure. Because grief itself doesn't translate into neat sentences. Sometimes grief is a heart that feels depleted, a nervous system stuck in survival mode. Sometimes it's a mind that keeps replaying what-ifs. Sometimes it's the inability to explain anything beyond, I don't even know how to be a person right now. Books offer a simpler entry point. You can find a language for what you're carrying in your body and you can put the book down if you need a break. There is safety in that, because often there is no break in your own grief.

One of the reasons fictional stories help so many people grieve is that grief doesn't need an identical plot to feel accurate. You can lose a parent and feel a line about a lost friend slice straight through you. You can go through a breakup and see yourself in a character mourning an old life. You can carry grief that isn't always socially validated — infertility, miscarriage, estrangement, loss of a dream, a version of you that existed before trauma — and you still find yourself relating to a story and feeling seen by characters that are nothing like your life on paper. Readers don't always connect through facts; they connect through emotion. The emotional architecture of grief is surprisingly familiar. The shock that makes it all feel sudden or unreal, the bargaining that shows up in regret, the anger at the world or those around you for continuing, the guilt that often appears when you least expect it. The confusion of being profoundly sad, and still catching yourself feeling joy in the same breath. Books about grief reflect those inner experiences back to us, and in doing so, they tell the truth that so many grievers need to hear: you are not broken, this is just grief.

When I began writing The Last Poem, I kept thinking about that afternoon in New York, how quickly strangers found common ground through what my books made them feel. I was trying to put language around love and loss, the way they live in the same place, the way they always have. What I've come to find is that the most powerful part of storytelling isn't always the stage. It's the transfer: a book passed from one friend to another, a screenshot of a line sent with a "this made me think of you," someone finding comfort in a fictional character at two am, a person realising page by page that grief isn't a personal failure, it's simply part of loving and living.

That's why it's important to continue writing stories with grief at their core, and why I think we keep reading them. Because again and again, I've seen how people find themselves inside that language, in the characters, in the moments, in the sentences they didn't know they needed. Maybe that's what books about grief offer at their best, a reminder that even in the loneliest season of our lives, someone else has felt it too. Maybe that's what we're all looking for, not a way to escape grief, but a way to be held inside it.