What is A Grief Observed about?

A Grief Observed is C. S. Lewis's record of his grief following the death of his wife Joy Davidman from bone cancer in 1960. He wrote it in notebooks shortly after her death, not intending publication. It was first published in 1961 under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk, and only after Lewis's own death was his authorship widely acknowledged. The book is short — fewer than 100 pages — but its emotional and philosophical content is intense.

Lewis does not write as a theologian explaining suffering. He writes as a bereaved man who finds that his grief makes him question everything he believed. The most famous passage is near the opening: he describes going to God in his grief and finding a door slammed in his face. This is not atheism; it is what he calls "the locked-door feeling," a desperate knocking with no response. He had written about suffering before — The Problem of Pain — but from the outside. Grief forced him inside the problem.

The book moves through four phases, roughly corresponding to its four short chapters. The first is raw, disoriented grief, in which Lewis is barely functional and finds himself doing absurd things like expecting Joy to appear. The second is an angry questioning of God. The third begins a slow recovery, in which Lewis starts to interrogate his own assumptions about what he had believed about Joy and about God. The fourth, which was not written continuously with the rest, is calmer and more resolved — though "resolved" is the wrong word. He is not where he started, and he hasn't arrived anywhere simple.

What distinguishes A Grief Observed from grief memoirs is Lewis's precision about the phenomenology of loss. He notices that grief feels not only like sadness but like fear. He notices that the image of Joy he was clinging to was partly his own projection. He notices that his theological certainties, when tested against the actual experience of loss, were often more about his own comfort than about God. The ruthlessness with which he applies his own intellect to his own grief is the book's most distinctive quality, and the most useful thing it offers to anyone reading it in the middle of their own loss.