Book Review: After Annie
Anna Quindlen
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/after-annie-anna-quindlen/1143644650
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
– W. S. Merwin
This superscript for the book describes Anna Quindlen’s novel, After Annie precisely. When Annie Brown dies at the bottom of page one, we are thrown directly into the chaos of her family as it begins the difficult and rocky journey of grieving a traumatic death. Through four “chapters” corresponding to the seasons of the year, we walk with Annie’s daughter Ali, her husband Bill, her best friend Annamarie, and to a lesser degree her other children Jamie, Ant, and Benjy.
We are exposed to their inner dialogs and feelings as they seek to map their immediately changed world. We are confronted by the interactions of other members of the community trying to bring comfort and make their own sense of this unexpected death. We view the life transformation that each person makes as they adjust, season by season, to the absence of the glue and central person in their lives.
It is a good book to get an arms-length view of grief, if at times it is a bit simplistic and easy. The book covers a year, and things wrap up a bit expectedly for some of the characters. Yet it still provides a textured insight into the grief experiences of a family. This is a strength because we see how different grief is for each person; we see some of the factors that go into a person’s individual experience of grief.
As a grieving person, it may be a hard book to read because of the many moments that your grief may be activated due to familiarity. But that is also a true value in reading this book. You can view someone else navigating this journey and find some good as well as some not so good ways of addressing grief. You will find yourself in these pages regardless of the type of death your person experienced. And if you are trying to learn about grief or how to support a grieving person, you will see many examples of ways to do that, as well as some tried and true ways that you shouldn’t.