‘’In the dark hours between midnight and dawn, we are alone with our thoughts. This is when we best sift through our personal grief.’’

Geometry of grief is a book with a fascinating concept, written by mathematician Michael Frame. With the book, the author tries to provide the reader with parallels between geometry and grief in a hope this might help to cope with situations of severe grief.

The books starts very promising with many beautifully written description of grief and the complexity of the emotion/situation. A citation:
‘’Grief is a response to an irreversible loss. A corollary: there is no anticipatory grief. To generate grief rather than sadness, the thing lost must carry great emotional weight, and it must pull back the veil that covers a transcendent aspect of the world.’’

As a mental health professional (physician), I found this part of the book very readable and relatable, yet at the same time honest, personal and philosophical.

But than I got lost. The author writes ‘’You may feel that we’ve wondered a long way from thoughts of grief, but we haven’t.’’ I personally just couldn’t follow. The author makes extensive parallels between geometry, or more general mathematics, and patterns of a grief response. Maybe I’m just not passionate enough about maths or maybe it’s been too long since I did abstract maths myself, but I got hopelessly lost.

In the final chapters of the book the authors sums it up very well with the combination of the combination of the following two sentences:
‘’Now I don’t know if this approach will be of use to someone whose thinking is not primarily geometrical or visual’’.
And
‘’We cannot enter the personal hell of another, but we can imagine our hell if we inhabited their situation’’.

I think it’s exactly that: this book is an amazing tool for those that try to create an order into the chaos, but in the way which for many others seems very abstract: through geometry. I think I just wasn’t the right target audience, and sincerely hope this book will find the right readers. Because grief is a heartbreaking process and anyone out there struggling should be able to find a relatable tool to guide and feel less alone.

"Could the world be different than we think? Is it different? Must it be only one thing, or can it be many? If we view the world in one way, does this forever bar us from all others?"

I remember sitting in the classroom years ago and hearing over and over again 'when will I ever use maths in real life". Our teacher tried to justify these opinions with basic practical uses. In hindsight, I wish he'd thought out of the box and highlighted how maths transcends the obvious mathematical uses and actually offers a lot of covert, real-world applications.

I didn't expect such an open-minded way of thinking, challenging the reader to consider the world past the framework by which we understand it, but I appreciated the in-depth explanations and justifications behind the thought-process. Further, I enjoyed the illustrations. The book isn't the easiest read, but it's extremely interesting.

I will certainly be recommending.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!

There was lots of interesting geometry stuff in here, and I do like lots of interesting geometry stuff. There was also some good memoir and even a few tidbits of grief. The book did not really convince me of what it seemed to be trying to convince me of, namely that geometry could help with the grief process. I have no question that there is a geometry of grief, and even that Michael Frame has received some benefit in his own grief process with geometry, but the connections made in the book were a bit willowy for me. They were fun and interesting and sometimes hard enough to follow that I simply gave up trying to follow them, but I don't really care. When I read about grief I'm mostly interested in seeing how someone else covers themself in the swaddling rather than in seeing how they are going to help me with my own grief. And there is plenty of that here. My grief and experience are too disparate from Mr. Frame for it to make any sense as a frame-work (ha ha ha), but it works absolutely as a slit in the fabric of human experience through which I can empathize with his grief. And that's all I'm asking.

This is a fascinating read. To bring in references of The Simpsons, fractal geometry, chaos theory in the context of how people deal with grief is just amazing.

Maths has been my kryptonite since day one of elementary school, which leaves me with what could euphemistically be described as a myopic view on the beauty of the subject. With the horrors of maths tests far behind me now, though, every once in a while I try to dabble in the odd popular science book for the purpose of cross-pollination - in German you’d call this “Even a blind chicken sometimes finds a kernel”. With that in mind, I was intrigued by the concept of a book marrying the concepts of mathematics and psychology, namely confronting grief through the lens of geometry, a proposition which, if treated well, sounds like a great step in broadening your horizon.

But why would you choose to read a book about grief if you’re lucky enough not to be going through it currently? As Frame points out, grief comes in many forms and sizes and, as a highly individualized experience, you don’t need to lose a loved one to feel grief. People can grieve choices they’ve made and the doors that closed permanently as a consequence: “But many of us are haunted by thoughts of a path not taken. Some choices lead us along paths that we cannot reverse. Even if we change course now, what remains of our lives will not unfold as if we had made the other choice years earlier. What might have been is beyond our reach, and we grieve this loss.” You can even grieve the way you used to see the world before you had certain insights. I dare say most lives contain at least a modicum of those kinds of grief, and while you can never truly prepare yourself for when absolute calamity strikes, it can be an advantage to know certain tools exist and how other people employ them.

One of the aspects that strike about this book is just how likeable the author is. Deeply steeped in humbleness, the writing is refreshing and, despite the overarching mathematical theme of the book, acutely palpable to lay people, which I presume to be a direct consequence of Frame’s decades spent teaching at Yale. The theoretical parts are always kept as concise as possible, followed by a story to give practical application to what has been discussed, and in my opinion, the messages come across sharp and clear.

He dives into (and clears up) popular topics such as parallel universes and the butterfly effect, which lends a great new viewpoint on grieving.

Another aspect I highly appreciate is that Frame gives ample book recommendations for further reading.

What comes as somewhat of a relieve to me personally is the fact that in this book, geometry is the medium through which the author chooses to express his view on psychological concepts and framing techniques to deal with grief, and the real beauty of the book lies in getting a glimpse into a completely mathematical mind and its outlook, and how it pictures and processes life concepts in terms of algebra. This is absolutely fascinating to behold!

I wish the book would end a little less abruptly, I would have preferred a final musing that neatly ties the whole parcel together, but then again, I do like an author who doesn’t waffle on.

All in all, this is a marvellous quick read to expand your view on life, nature, and grief. Here some highlights that stood out:

“A notion that’s repeated often in this book is that an idea can’t be unseen. Taking in others’ ideas before thinking through my own experiences with grief might have limited how I understood those experiences. […] The first step is to understand your own experience, then see how it fits into established works.”

“When I see something beautiful, that first realization is tinged with grief, because I know I’ll never again feel so strongly about it. When I see something pretty, there is no initial gasp like the gasp that accompanies the first glimpse of beauty. Subsequent viewings of the same pretty thing can produce about the same pleasure. We feel no grief, because our initial impression is reproducible.”

“I focused on the actions, not the feelings, and imagined other people helping their neighbours in similar ways. I saw what Dad did […] as part of a larger picture. Even though he would not do this again, the idea, the movement, of neighbour helping neighbour, to which Dad belonged, would continue. Projection to the space of neighbour helping neighbour eased the grief.”

“Death closes the door to the further experiences with those we have irreversibly lost. But grief opens a door, maybe just a crack, to let us remix memories, see actions in a new way. Let us think what the person who has died would want us to do. Examples are familiar: “In lieu of flowers, the family suggests a donation to…” […] A cause dear to the person who has died gets a boost in their memory. Their influence still is felt.”

Frame did not convince me of the relatedness of geometry and grief, but I’d watch a dialectic about it - or his Ted talk if he gave one. The book is lovely and moving.