Author Talk: Danielle Crittenden — Dispatches from Grief - with Mary Haft

Author Danielle Crittenden discusses their book "Dispatches from Grief" at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

On a February morning, Danielle Crittenden's world cleaved in two: the life before her daughter Miranda was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment, and the life after. With unflinching honesty and unexpected grace, she chronicles the shattering impact of a child's death and the strange afterlife of grief itself: how it infiltrates grocery stores and dinner parties, transforms friendships, and ultimately reshapes the mourner as fundamentally as the world.

Here is grief in all its terrible specificity: the police call that changes everything, the surreal task of choosing a burial dress, the well-meaning friends who "griefsplain." But here too is love distilled: a mother's meditation on a daughter who commanded dinner tables at twelve, who interviewed Dick Cheney with a child's notebook, who transformed into a luminous young woman living her dreams in New York. She writes of joining "the world's worst club"--parents who have lost children--and the terrible wisdom its members share.

Written with the narrative power that has made Crittenden one of our most incisive observers of family and culture, Dispatches from Grief brings a journalist's eye to the landscape of loss. For those walking through grief, for those who love someone grieving, and for all who dare imagine how precious and precarious our time together is, this book stands as both singular portrait and universal truth.

Danielle Crittenden is a journalist, author, and former host of the podcast The Femsplainers, known for her incisive and original commentary on women, family, and modern life. In addition to writing a popular monthly newsletter on Substack, her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and more. She is the author of four previous books, including What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, praised by Vanity Fair as the work of "one of the most important new thinkers about women and family." Born in Toronto, she now lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, journalist and author David Frum.

Crittenden is in conversation with Mary Haft, a writer, producer, and founder of HAFT PRODUCTIONS, LLC, specializing in documentaries for nonprofits. A Vice President of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and Co-Founder of the Nantucket Book Festival, she is the author of Nantucket: Portrait of an American Town, and a recently completed memoir: Staying the Course: The Making of a Marine Mom.

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