Grief is the Thing with Feathers

"I was aware of this book for years before I read it, because I knew that it was about two children who’ve lost their mother. As someone who had been bereaved as a child, I actually thought I’d find it too unbearably sad to read. I was also writing a book about grief myself, and didn’t want to read it in case I became entwined with it or accidentally ended up borrowing something from it. I didn’t think I could confront that subject in this form, but had a sense that the book was probably going to be brilliant. And it is. What struck me about Grief Is the Thing With Feathers is the way in which grief is embodied. In Max Porter’s novel or novel-poem, grief becomes ‘Crow’, who descends upon this family. He’s variously a babysitter, a friend, a ghost, a terrorizer. He impersonates a mother; he’s a joker; he’s twisted. He causes chaos. That’s what it captures: the absolute unpredictability, and nastiness, and then sudden benevolence of grief. The theatricality of what can happen to a person, to a household, after a bereavement. Like some of my other choices, this book captures how very different the experience of grief is for different people—in an environment, a family network, or a friendship group. By depicting the young boys’ perspective, switching to the father’s perspective and back again, he brilliantly captures moments when—while only one person has died—everyone has lost a different person. And it’s utterly, heartbreakingly beautiful in the place where it finishes. Because it’s a poem as well as a novel, it leaves spaces. Porter uses the spaces of the book so that you feel you can insert yourself in it. But I did, as I feared, find it extremely tough to read. I think it’s the primary narrative form of how a poem begins, if you can do very little else: an incantation, a collection, a gathering together and a form of composure. I was also just thinking about a devastating bit in this book from the boys, that evokes this powerful sense of a robbed future: We used to think she would turn up one day and say it had all been a test. […] We used to think she could see us through mirrors. We used to think she was an undercover agent, sending Dad money, asking for updates. We were careful to age her, never trap her. Careful to name her Granny, when Dad became Grandpa. We hope she likes us. My voice is catching just talking about it. When I was writing my own book, I thought about how grief just sort of turns up. It’s enormously difficult to talk about because it’s a strange temporal state—it’s past, present, future. The sense the person gone is somehow overseeing what’s happening is a very simple thought, but it matters a great deal. Porter completely captures that sentiment with the line “I hope she likes us.” I think grief does shift one’s sense of roles. Crow is shape-changing, but so is the dad, and so are the boys. The boys are looking after the dad, and the house in itself becomes a kind of masquerade. Metamorphosis is central; selfhood isn’t stable. These are interesting—and real—repercussions about what actually happens in a grieving family. Porter is very clear that although the experience of his novel is based on the death of his own father, who died when he was six, that this is not about him. One can’t help thinking, coming from a household which has lost a parent, that what happens is a sense that at the table, there’s always an empty space. But at the same time, grief requires people to change shape. To suddenly have to be other things. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I can’t speak for what it’s like to be a parent who’s lost a partner, but Porter plays it very beautifully. Bereaved children may feel at times that they have to be parents, and parents may feel that they need to be children. What one is also grieving for is the clarity afforded by the neatly-designated roles of a happy family. Hence Crow is kind of like an au pair , stepping in to play those roles. All the while, Crow’s doing impersonations in the background. It raises an interesting question: what do we do with desire in the realm of grief? Where and how does it play out? I said earlier that grief behaves badly and grief is risk-taking. Among the taboos we have when talking about grief—that it may drive people to drink or other forms of risk-taking—I’ve always been fascinated by the way it can drive people towards desire, or appetite. Yes. We don’t talk about it enough, though it’s tracked in medical journals. In this case, I don’t think the father in Max Porter’s book is particularly desirous. [ Laughs ]. He doesn’t do anything outrageous; he just gets a new girlfriend. But the question remains: where does sex lie in relation to grief?"