This week’s live video chat was a deviation from my norm.

I spoke to the writer Danielle Crittenden Frum, whom I have known for many years, about her memoir: Dispatches of Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through The Unthinkable in which she describes the horrendous journey she has been on since unexpectedly losing her first-born 32-year-old daughter, Miranda, in February 2024.

She explains she didn’t intend to write a book initially, but she’s a trained reporter who comes from a family of journalists, and out of habit, she’d write down scenes and feelings in real time, feeling “like a foreign correspondent in a war zone”. Slowly she began to realize that what she had might be of value – to her and to other people.

She discovered that there’s not much useful literature out there when something this devastating occurs. She found C. S. Lewis’s memoir, A Grief Observed, on losing his wife, Joy, to cancer, helpful, but the famous Five Stages Of Grief by Elisabeth Kubler Ross was “a joke….there is no order to this grief.” And as for Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking? “It’s so name-droppy…I am not interested in what table you sat at.”

Read the rest of the article and watch the full conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates.