Four Funerals and a Wedding

Jill Smolowe has written a moving memoir of loss – and also a uniquely uplifting one. Emphasizing the resilience, not the grief (though she portrays both with a novelist’s eye for detail and ear for dialogue), she offers essential insights for those who have lost people they love, or know others who have, or will one day find themselves in one or the other of these positions – in other words, for every one of us. Exploding many truisms about dealing with death and illness, this book provides insight for navigating the perilous path between saying too much or too little, and concrete suggestions by which the bereaved, and those who care about them, can move beyond the ritual “Let me know if there is anything I can do.”
–Deborah Tannen, author of the New York Times bestseller You Just Don’t Understand

Many accounts of grief are called "brave" and "unsparing," but Four Funerals and a Wedding truly is those things. It's the first account from the silent majority who respond to loss not with paralyzing sorrow but with remarkable strength. Jill Smolowe challenges orthodoxies surrounding bereavement and shows how man does not just endure, but prevails.
--Ruth Davis Konigsberg, author of The Truth About Grief