Virtual Book Discussion Series for Adults Bereaved in Childhood
Adults who experienced loss during childhood have few places to tell our stories, remember our loved ones, and connect with others. I want to change that!
In memory of my mom – Mary Lee Wimberg Morse, 1933-1970
Though my mom died of cancer when I was seven, I didn’t start grieving until my 20s and only much later realized that the loss will always be part of me. At this stage in my journey, I feel called to publicly honor my mom’s memory for the first time. Reading in a community seems like the perfect tribute, because my lifelong love of books and libraries originated with her.
Here’s how it works:
Monthly book selections are a mix of new and older fiction as well as nonfiction. For each book, a live discussion takes place in a Zoom call. There is a dedicated private Facebook group where I post updates and questions about the books and you can comment as you feel moved. Feel free to join in one or both avenues of discussion as you prefer.
Sign up here! Your confirming email will provide information about the Zoom calls.
Be a part of the book discussion!
When I enroll you in the book discussion, I will also sign you up for my newsletter.
Book Selections and Zoom Discussion Dates
by Stephanie Foo
(2022)
Zoom Discussion: Sunday, March 26 at 2:00 pm EST
By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper but was plagued by anxiety and questioned what was wrong with herself. Then she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years. Both of Foo’s parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she’d moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD. Ultimately, she discovers that you don’t move on from trauma—but you can learn to move with it. Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body—and examines one woman’s ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.
by Tommy Orange
(2018)
Zoom Discussion: Sunday, April 30 at 2:00 pm EST
An award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. They converge and collide on one fateful day at the Big Oakland Powwow and together this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American—grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. A Pulitzer Prize finalist.
by Prince Harry
(2023)
Zoom Discussion: Sunday, June 4 at 2:00 pm EST
Before losing his mother, twelve-year-old Prince Harry was known as the carefree one, the happy-go-lucky Spare to the more serious Heir. Grief changed everything. He struggled at school, struggled with anger, with loneliness—and, because he blamed the press for his mother’s death, he struggled to accept life in the spotlight. After serving in the army, two combat tours made him a hero at home. But he suffered from crippling panic attacks. Above all, he couldn’t find true love. Then he met Meghan. From the beginning, Harry and Meghan were preyed upon by the press and subjected to abuse, racism, and lies. Their safety and mental health at risk, Harry saw no other way to prevent tragedy but to flee his mother country. For the first time, Prince Harry tells his own story, chronicling his journey with raw, unflinching honesty. A landmark publication, Spare is full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.
by Diane Zinna
(2020)
Zoom Discussion: Sunday, August 6 at 2:00 pm EST
Lauren Cress teaches at a small college. Though poised, smart, and well-liked, she is troubled and isolated, still grappling with the sudden death of her parents ten years earlier. She seems to exist at a remove from everyone around her until a new student joins her class: charming, magnetic Siri. They fall headlong into an all-consuming friendship that makes Lauren feel as though she is reclaiming her lost adolescence. When Siri invites her on a trip home to Sweden, Lauren impulsively accepts. But once there, Lauren finds herself drawn to Siri’s enigmatic brother and starts to see a new side of her friend: selfish, reckless, even cruel. On their last night, Lauren accompanies Siri and her friends on a seaside camping trip to celebrate Midsommar’s Eve, and under the light of the unsetting sun, things take a dark turn. Ultimately, Lauren must acknowledge the truth of what happened with Siri and come to terms with her own tragic past in this deeply felt debut.
by Zinzi Clemons
(2017)
Zoom Discussion: Sunday, September 17 at 2:00 pm EST
A stunning novel about a young motherless African American woman coming of age. Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother’s childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor—someone, or something, to love. In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandi’s life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood. Through emotional vignettes, Clemmons portrays what it means to choose to live, after loss. An elegiac distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young woman’s understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades.
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