Journalist Danielle Crittenden joins writer Andrew Solomon for a conversation about her journey living through every parent’s worst fear, and her new memoir, Dispatches from Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable, “a little masterpiece [that] joins the literary canon of great books about mourning and the search for solace” (Tina Brown).
On a February morning, Danielle Crittenden’s world cleaved in two: the life before her daughter Miranda was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment, and the life after. In her new memoir, she maps the territory of profound loss with the clarity of a foreign correspondent filing reports from a country no parent ever wishes to visit. Dispatches from Grief stands as both a singular portrait of this loss and a universal exploration of its aftermath.
Hear Crittenden as she discusses, with unflinching honesty and grace, both the shattering impact of a child’s death and the strange afterlife of grief itself — the way it infiltrates our daily lives, transforms old friendships and forges new ones, and ultimately reshapes the mourner as fundamentally as it has reshaped the world.
Danielle Crittenden is a journalist, author, and former host of the The Femsplainers Podcast and Substack, known for her incisive commentary on women and modern life. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and more. Her new memoir, Dispatches from Grief, chronicles the sudden loss of her 32-year-old daughter, Miranda, in 2024, and the two interminable years of pain, love, and life since then. She is also the author of four previous books, including What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, which Vanity Fair praised as the work of “one of the most important new thinkers about women and family.” Born in Toronto, she now lives in Washington, D.C., and Wellington, Ontario, with her husband, journalist David Frum.
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