Death provides one of the great themes of literature, and how a culture deals with death provides one of the great themes of anthropology, because our talk about death tells us what meaning we attach to life. Lolly Winston's absorbing novel Good Grief merges the anthropological curiosities of 21st-century American culture with the intimate psychology of one woman figuring out how to continue living after her husband succumbs to cancer. Mingling the obsessive, blinkered perspective of an older Bridget Jones with the wry, morbid humor of Six Feet Under, Winston produces a novel that doesn't always plumb the depths of human experience, but whose unsentimental warmth and poignancy seems tailor-made for the book-club set.
On the cover of the hardback, two female feet in pink bunny slippers strike a pose, referring to the scene in Good Grief's first act when Sophie Stanton, PR hack for a California drug company, shows up at work in pajamas and a robe. Seen through her eyes, in the context of her battle with depression after her husband's death, getting to work at all is an accomplishment. Unfortunately, her supervisors don't see it that way, and soon, Sophie has quit her job and moved to a small town in Oregon, hoping to return to the idyll of her college days with her former roommate. Working at a restaurant for a demanding and sexist chef, starting her own bakery (to bury herself in distractions as the anniversary of her husband's death approaches), or interpreting her muddled emotional response to an actor who woos her, Sophie doesn't always know herself fully, but she lets the audience in on whatever she knows.
Good Grief has a thirtysomething scruffiness likely to make it a favorite among women of a certain age. But it deserves more than shelf space next to The Nanny Diaries and I Don't Know How She Does It. At times, when it delves piercingly into habits of grieving (or not being allowed to grieve), it has the cleansing acid touch of Jessica Mitford's The American Way Of Death. Sophie isn't exactly adding a new chapter to the great literature on the subject, but her story illuminates truths often neglected by the greats as too trivial to report.