Infinite Books Publishes Dispatches from Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable by Danielle Crittenden

A Mother’s Memoir, Selected as a Heather’s Pick at Indigo Chapters.

Recently,  Infinite Books publishes Dispatches from Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable, the new memoir by journalist and author Danielle Crittenden. The book is an account of the sudden death of her thirty-two-year-old daughter, Miranda Frum, who was found in her Brooklyn apartment on a February morning.

Dispatches from Grief is the rare memoir of loss that refuses easy comfort.

With precision, restraint, and unexpected humor, Crittenden traces the strange afterlife of grief: the friends who disappear, the well-meaning consolations that wound, the routines that no longer hold, and the slow work of carrying a daughter’s memory forward. The result is a book that earns its place beside the canonical works of mourning.

Indigo Chapters, Canada’s largest bookseller, has selected Dispatches from Grief as a Heather’s Pick, an honor reserved for titles personally chosen and championed by Indigo founder Heather Reisman. The Atlantic published an excerpt, “On Losing a Daughter,” in its May issue, and the book has drawn early praise from David Brooks, Anne Applebaum, Tina Brown, Andrew Solomon, Lori Gottlieb, Christopher Buckley, and Pauline Boss, among others.

“Danielle wrote Dispatches through the worst thing that can happen to a parent, and she wrote it without flinching and without false comfort,” said Jimmy Soni, Editor-in-chief of Infinite Books. “I have never seen readers respond to one the way they are responding to this. People who have lost children. People who love someone who has. People who simply recognize the truth when they see it on a page. They tell us, again and again, that Danielle has named something they thought could not be named. That is the highest thing a book can do, and Danielle has done it.”

Praise for Dispatches from Grief

“Dispatches from Grief moves with the power of a freight train over rough terrain. Danielle Crittenden makes us eyewitnesses to the hour-by-hour crawl through grief… Crittenden has been through hell, but has not emerged with empty hands.” David Brooks, New York Times columnist and bestselling author of The Second Mountain

“A little masterpiece. I was pulled through in one voracious sitting, moved by every line. Dispatches from Grief joins the literary canon of great books about mourning and the search for solace.” Tina Brown, author of The Vanity Fair Diaries and The Palace Papers

“Her words ring with truth, love, clarity, and courage. Writing this book was an act of strength.” Andrew Solomon, National Book Award–winning author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon

“Danielle Crittenden bravely takes us into this shattering… Dispatches from Grief is about how we find our way into this new story, not by ‘moving on,’ but by learning how to remain present when loss becomes permanent.” Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

“Danielle’s account is unsparing, vivid, and harrowing, a mother’s howl of pain that, in the final pages, mercifully reaches a kind of diminuendo and becomes a canticle of maternal love.” Christopher Buckley, author of Thank You for Smoking and The Judge Hunter

“After her daughter’s sudden death, she writes with raw emotion and uncommon literary skill that ultimately instructs us… bonds of love can continue forever, but in a new way. No closure required.” Pauline Boss, Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota; author of Ambiguous Loss and The Myth of Closure

“The author’s pain is unvarnished. Crittenden writes about her state of shock with scant yet emotive prose. A moving and intimate expression of pain.” Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Danielle Crittenden is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She is the author of What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us and the novel Amanda Bright@Home. Born in Toronto, she lives in Washington, D.C. and Wellington, Ontario, with her husband, the writer David Frum.