As the story of the New York Times bestseller Good Grief continues, readers learn she’d been married only three years when her husband died of cancer, and that three months after his death she drove through the garage door. Clearly, the reader discovers along with her as the pages keep turning, this grieving thing is harder than expected.
Yet she perseveres. Sophie goes to her grief group and occasionally cheats on the homework, and she gives all of her new furniture to Goodwill so she won’t be forced to part with the boxes filled with her husband’s belongings. She skips showering for a week and drives 25 mph through Silicon Valley rush hour to be late to a job she hates where she’s overwhelmed by her workload.
It’s almost a relief when she hits rock bottom because the reader is flinching through challenging meetings and crying in Safeway with her.
Combining Grief Groups and Margaritas
The reader follows the PR manager-cum-unemployed and not totally stable houseguest-cum-waitress-cum-chef-cum-bakery owner through more than 300 pages of Oreo inhaling, weeping, and breaking down in the supermarket and at work, to a new home far away where she clumsily attempts to start over. She rents a house and a “little sister,” has her first real post-marriage date at the hospital, and dumps pasta on a customer.
This is author Lolly Winston’s first attempt at a novel, and finishing it makes one wish she’d write more. Her heroine is plausible; any normal person could picture herself being friends with Sophie, knowing someone like her, or being like her after some life crisis. Sophie is far from the perfect Jackie Kennedy widow she wants to be, but she’s much more endearing with all of her flaws than an ideal version could be.
Her experiences make all who have self-medicated with a carton of ice cream or a box of cookies feel like they’re not alone. As she sits in her grief group not crying, readers who have experienced pain that goes beyond tears can sympathize. As she ponders the enormity of life without her husband, a point she thought she’d left behind, and gladly, on her wedding day, and then pitches a plate at the wall and makes a pitcher of margaritas, the reader is grateful for the permission to laugh.
Healing and Thanksgiving
The beauty of the story is that it draws the reader into Sophie's world. It's easy to be annoyed with her mother-in-law, Marion, whose perky get-to-it-tiveness is too much after a sleepless, sugar-laden night. The reader wants to break dishes with her in the backyard and worries that the leak in the house will stop her from selling it. Sophie's anger is palpable as she curses her husband, Ethan, and then her mother for dying, and herself for not being able to handle it.
The reader has first-date butterflies when Sophie is waiting for her date, the handsome actor Drew, and cringes when she meets Crystal, her match in the local Big Brother/Big Sister program, as the difficult teenager presents herself. And readers will get hungry imagining the delectable dishes Sophie is cooking up in her head and her kitchen.
Most importantly, even though the book ends happily, the reader will be sad when it’s over because Sophie Stanton makes people fall in love with her, the woman who at the beginning of the book was everything no one wants to be.
The story closes on a beautiful Thanksgiving – beautiful not because it’s perfect (Sophie’s best friend is bitter, Drew is sick and Marion, who makes an about-face in those 342 pages, is flirting with a homeless man), but because Sophie is surrounded by family, unusual though it may be. She realizes the pain and grief of losing Ethan will never go away, but that the grief has become good. And it allows the reader to suffer and heal with her and perhaps make a few inroads through her own grief – or at least a carton of Ben and Jerry’s pralines and cream.
Title: Good Grief
Author: Lolly Winston
Publisher: Warner Books
Publication date: April 2004
ISBN: 0-446-53304-1
Heidi Toth - BA in journalism, MBA from Texas TechI spent three years at The University Daily (now The Daily Toreador), the college newspaper, ...
