Speaking of mourning

and why it seems to be so difficult

Hello from London, where I will be for most of the next month at any rate, doing two book events (and dashing up to Edinburgh for a third, scroll down for details on all that). I’m jetlagged and settling into the flat where I’ll be staying and listening to the magpies and the Overground going by and trying unsuccessfully to shake off jetlag. But wanted to write to you lovelies before the weekend, so here I am, apologies if I make less sense than usual.

It’s been a month since From the Ashes officially went on sale in North America (and audiobook and ebook sale everywhere). In that time I’ve done talks in four cities and dodged two hurricanes and cried with strangers and written barely-legible messages in lots and lots of books. I’ve been stupidly grateful to the oldest and dearest of friends and newer ones too for joining me on stage to talk about this thing and to everyone who’s bought a copy, truly.

And I’ve also noticed something about this book that feels different to the previous two, something that I think goes hand in hand with the subject matter and tone. (Maybe some of you have written memoirs or something like before and can tell me if this happens to you.)

Which is that so many of you have written me personal notes to tell me that you loved the book/the talk, and so many of you have shared your grief stories with me, I’m overwhelmed by it. Genuinely: as a journalist I try to remember every day that no one owes me their story, that it is a gift for people to be willing to share anything about themselves.

It is confirming something about why I wrote the book in the first place: that we have so few resources for grieving in the late-capitalist hellscape in which we’re surviving, even as the world continues to give us so many more reasons to grieve. I have been caught the last week between the yahrzeit of October 7 (falling in the high holidays) and Hurricanes Helene and Milton and the horrific damage and the different meanings and layers of evacuation notices, as I’m sure so many of you have. Thinking of the people who have been displaced by bombs or storms without help and those who were unable to get away and may be found still in the rubble. Thinking once again of what we can salvage from the wreckage and the meaning of mutual aid. Thinking of organized abandonment and the anti-state state which is only good for dealing out more death.

So many reasons to grieve. So many messages in my inbox, Thank you for saying this, thank you, I lost X, it has been Y years since Z happened, I have had no words for it. We are all carrying so much, and I am so happy to have encouraged you to share the weight.

But I am (perhaps naively) surprised by how many of these messages come to me directly and privately, how few of them have been made public. Writing this book (rather than doing Work Won’t Love You Back 2.0) was a wager that we needed to talk more about grief collectively, not just one to one. It was a suggestion that we are in some ways already creating spaces of public mourning but missing opportunities to sustain them. And yet it seems we need more.

Of course I don’t expect a book to do the work of organizing. And I think that organizing is happening in many places. I know it’s happening in Minnesota because Cat Salonek and Rod Adams told us about the work during our talk last week. I know it’s happening elsewhere, in all of the grief rituals marking October 7 and a year of genocide, the tashlich and so much more.

But it’s not enough, not if my inbox is any indication.

A friend who is a lifelong organizer suggested to me that the panel we did at Socialism could be turned into a kind of roving workshop, but the other thing I’ve learned after a month of this book is how hard on me holding that kind of space has been. I am grateful for it and also I want to never do it again and also I am going to do it again and again and again, this month in Britain and then soon back in the US in Texas and hopefully New York and elsewhere too, and yet. I can’t hold it forever and I need to be held in turn when I step out of those spaces. And this is why it’s hard to create these spaces, isn’t it?

It feels like a kind of magic, when people gather to take each other’s hurts seriously. (Which is something Brandy Jensen said on last week’s Heart Reacts, actually: that taking one another seriously is a kind of love.) But it also requires a lot from us, and it is often easier to turn away and to return to the day to day, the latest meme, the newest horror, the irritations and frustrations that make up a life.

Are you doing this work? Do you want to talk to me about it? How do we turn these discussions to be outward-facing?

The journalist Francesca Nava told me that during Covid’s early days in Bergamo, she felt like “a pain collector,” and of course I was there collecting her pain and now I feel like one once again, but I am collecting the stories sent to me in response to my book, but what would it look like to share those stories outward? Would reading groups help? What kinds of things can I, a roving journalist who spends probably less than half the year in her own bed, put together to help?

Because it is hard, to think of so many people who feel they have so little room to talk about their pain that they are sharing it with a stranger.

Troublemaking

You can still get From the Ashes wherever books are sold in North America. I highly encourage buying from your local bookstore—ask them to order it if they aren’t carrying it, buy it if they are. Magers and Quinn in Minneapolis and Pilsen Community Books in Chicago have signed copies, or at least they did when I left those cities. If you need to order online, I recommend Bookshop.org and you can order from my page here.

You can also get it as an ebook and an audiobook anywhere in the world, if either of those are your preferred medium, and the audiobook is in my very own voice.

You can still get the beautiful art prints made by Nicole Manganelli—order them now directly from Radical Emprints, sign up for her newsletter, and if you have a bookstore or other distro, she has a new wholesale page! I also have a stack of them to sell at my British events…

Now for a little bit of bad news. Due to a printing crisis, the official release date of From the Ashes in Britain and Europe is now December 5. BUT. I am still doing my October events, and we WILL have books for sale at all of those (and potentially a few left over, depending on how full those events are). And yes, you should be able to order the ebook and the audiobook from all the usual suspects as of right now. So if you want to get your hands on a pretty and signed hardcover, help do some advance hype for the book, and hear me elaborate on all of the above with some of the smartest people I know, here are the details:

First stop, Housmans in Kings Cross, London on October 12! (THAT’S THIS SATURDAY.) 7pm, register here, I’ll be in conversation with K Biswas, critic, thinker, editor, and reporter extraordinaire and a generous reader of my work since my first book.

Next, Lighthouse Books in Edinburgh! 7pm, October 17, with Emily Kenway, whose book Who Cares overlaps with so much of my work, I can’t wait to be in conversation with her.

You can preorder From the Ashes from both of these bookstores with your registration for the events.

Then I’ll be back home to London for October 23 at Pelican House! Starting at 7, with Dalia Gebrial, Camille Barbagallo and other guests tbd very soon. Cash (or card) bar run by the good folks at Pelican House and books on sale direct from me.

And after this I get to take a break for a while, so come out and toast before I die of exhaustion.

If you want to host me at your organization or bookstore, please do get in touch!

Also, if you really can’t get enough of my past events, you can watch or listen here:

Magers & Quinn Youtube

Spotify playlist of all the podcast appearances thus far, including Chattanooga panel

Haymarket House Youtube

Socialism Conference panel Youtube

Writing

Incredibly, I have had a couple of articles go up as well in the last month. (No wonder I’m wrecked.) While I was in Chattanooga I spoke to some of the workers at Volkswagen who are on to their next big challenge: getting a great union contract that can be an example to autoworkers across the South. At In These Times.

And a big review essay considering the family and several books by its sharpest critics, at Dissent.

Podcasting

Heart Reacts is back from our brief break and last week we invited Brandy Jensen on to give us advice about giving advice. We talked about romantic optimism vs. pessimism, whether unrequited love is real, and what Emma Goldman would say about dating in 2024.

Getting an advice podcast off the ground is a challenge because not enough people know we exist to send us questions, so please, if you’ve been considering it, send along! Totally anonymous. And please do share with your friends and comrades and that person you’re thinking of writing in about. Available wherever you get podcasts (and if it isn’t, let me know and I’ll see if I can fix that).

And someone else’s dog(s)

This is Bear and Bruce, who belong (well, she’s dogsitting the former) to my New Orleans friend Cassady. They are very very good boys.