Books like A Grief Observed

01

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl · Psychology

Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's account of his years as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and the psychological theory he developed from that experience.

A kindred memoir read.

02

Night

Elie Wiesel · Memoir

Night is Elie Wiesel's account of his deportation from the Transylvanian town of Sighet in 1944 and his survival of Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

A kindred memoir read.

03

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Atul Gawande · Health

Being Mortal is Atul Gawande's investigation into why modern medicine is so bad at helping people die well.

A kindred memoir read.

04

The Seven Storey Mountain

Thomas Merton · Memoir

The Seven Storey Mountain is Thomas Merton's autobiography, published in 1948 when he was thirty-three years old.

A kindred memoir read.

05

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion · Memoir

Joan Didion's account of the year following the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, is the most rigorous and unflinching memoir of grief in American literature.

Shares grief and marriage with A Grief Observed.

06

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers · Memoir

Dave Eggers's debut memoir about losing both parents to cancer within five weeks and raising his younger brother Toph while trying to start a literary magazine in San Francisco in the mid-1990s arrived in 2000 with unusual self-consciousness about its own nature.

Both dig into grief.

07

Crying in H Mart

Michelle Zauner · Memoir

Crying in H Mart is Michelle Zauner's memoir of her mother's death from cancer and the loss it made her confront: not just of a parent but of the Korean half of her identity.

Both dig into grief.

08

Just Kids

Patti Smith · Memoir

Just Kids is Patti Smith's National Book Award-winning memoir of her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from their first meeting in New York in 1967 through their years of shared poverty, artistic development, and eventual celebrity, to Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS in 1989.

Both dig into loss.

09

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Lori Gottlieb · Memoir

Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist who, after a sudden and shattering breakup, found herself in therapy of her own.

Both dig into grief.

10

Out of Africa

Isak Dinesen · Memoir

Out of Africa is Isak Dinesen's memoir of the seventeen years she spent running a coffee farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi, from 1914 to 1931.

Both dig into loss.

11

Spare

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex · Memoir

Spare is Prince Harry's account of his life from childhood through his decision to step back from senior royal duties in 2020.

Both dig into grief.

12

The Snow Leopard

Peter Matthiessen · Memoir

Peter Matthiessen's National Book Award-winning account of a two-month trek into the Dolpo region of Nepal in 1973 is several things at once: a naturalist's field journal, a spiritual autobiography, and a meditation on grief.

Both dig into grief.