Competitive Grieving

How can a novel about the death of a young television star be light reading? When it is written with the deftness and grace that Zelevansky has injected into this marvelous, thoughtful new novel. This is a beautiful, hopeful novel centered around Wren coming to terms with the death of her long term best friend Stewart. The suddenness of death and the realization that even those close to us don’t share all their secrets.

Wren is such a likable character that the reader (this reader in particular) certainly connected to her. Even the location, NYC, Upper Westside, where I live, made it even more accessible. Her descriptions are pitch perfect I love her semi-charicature group of hangers on who inevitably appear at funerals. Best of all, I love George, the knight who enters this scene.

I think this is a special book and I will urge all my friends to read it. I also think it will be valuable for book clubs to discuss. It is rich and full of lessons to discuss and digest.

Thank you Netgalley for this absolutely special read.

COMPETITIVE GRIEVING may wear its sadness on its sleeve, but it holds a huge, messy, poignant, complicated love story close to its vest. We follow thirty-six-year-old Wren as she contends with the recent, sudden death of Stewart, her best friend since childhood and a rising star in television. Alongside her is George, Stu's lawyer and friend, as well as "the vultures" -- Stu's friends from LA. The group of big, clashing personalities is forced together in Stewart's NYC apartment while Wren tries to fulfill the task bequeathed her in Stu's will: sort through his earthly belongings, and allow those in the inner circle to take mementos. Wren detests the performative grief she sees all around her, and struggles to understand how the boy she grew up with could/would have surrounded himself with such awful people. Worse, Wren discovers there's quite a lot she didn't know about Stewart -- and the distance between who she thought he was and who he became before his death seems as insurmountable as the chasm between life and death.

Ultimately, Stewart's death forces Wren to face the daunting prospect of living her own life. In this way, COMPETITIVE GRIEVING is a delayed coming-of-age story (what do we call an awakening that happens after adolescence but before midlife?); it's not that Wren needs to "grow up" per se, but rather that she needs to grow out -- out of her comfort zone, her assumptions, her safety net. In classic narrative terms, we find Wren in her Dark Night of the Soul straightaway, and the novel follows her on the long path toward dawn.

There's an unexpectedly delicious romance in this novel, made especially compelling by the wry humor shared between the love interests. Less unexpected but still particularly compelling is the book's meditation on depression, which is as hard to process as it is authentic. Zelevansky manages difficult subjects with grace and nuance, making space for the full range of emotions both Wren and readers experience. Writing about deeply-felt loss -- and the chaotic, messy, maelstrom of feeling that goes along with it -- can so easily tilt into sentimentality, but Zelevansky resists the Siren call to tug on heartstrings. If you read the Acknowledgements, you'll understand why.

Content warning: depression, suicide, death

Thank you to Netgalley and Blackstone Publishing for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I’ve always been a sucker for beautiful, bold covers, and when the book’s content and writing is just as big and beautiful, the author can connect with me on another level. On a different note, Wren, the main character, is my spirit animal.

Part romantic comedy, part devastating loss, part finding yourself, Competitive Grieving realistically emulates life as we all know it, with incredibly real emotions, where no one person feels or handles grief the same way.

Some people are shit. Some people are beautiful. But most people are a mixture of the two, and Competitive Grieving doesn’t hesitate to make you realize there’s more to grief than outward appearance. There’s more to people than what they show you on any given day.

Are you the person who can’t cry when something devastating happens? Are you the one who can’t stop crying? Do you immediately become the spokesperson and take control? Do you judge everyone around you for their grief, when you know that no one knows this person better than you?

Ultimately, we’re all in this world, trying to understand life and love and those around us, that may not be around us indefinitely. I could actually (have actually) seen myself doing, saying, living some of these moments with the characters, and to me, that makes an amazing piece of art.