'...which is another kind of grief...'

A few words on the end of grieving:

Yesterday I woke up happy and didn't think

about you until midnight.
This means my shrine is on fire.

Which is another kind of grief.
As if we said goodbye in my sleep.

— K. Iver, "April 25, 2020," in Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco

If you'd like to learn more about this book, I wrote about it for the Trans Rights Readathon.

Also:

"Incomplete or failed mourning, according to Melanie Klein, has pathological consequences. These might include: depression, mania, the incapacity to form deep abiding relationships, and a desire to halt time so that the loss cannot be transformed into a past event. What, then, about a loss that is ongoing, that cannot by definition be transformed into a past event?
* * *
According to the Kleinians, the worst pathological consequence of the failure to complete mourning is repetition: the model of the loss is endlessly acted out in psychic life. Certainly this has already been theorised with respect to Israel’s instrumentalising of Holocaust memory for the purposes of domination and warfare. “One way of understanding Israel that I think should not be controversial,” wrote Gabriel Winant, “is to say that it is a machine for the conversion of grief into power.”"
Isabella Hammad, Standing on the rubble: On Gaza, ruins and mourning, Equator, July 8, 2026

When we read a novel, we can know everything except what the novelist chose not to tell us

"The uncritical repetition of half-truths by the press only reinforced my faith in the medium of fiction as the most honest investigative tool available to us," Askold Melnyczuk writes,

"because of all it does not claim for itself, as well as for the freedoms the genre grants. Fiction invites the writer to present an argument about causality. The only mysteries we're left with after finishing a novel are ones the writer has deliberately chosen not to resolve. Madame Bovary's suicide does not come as a shock; we know why Anna Karenina stepped in front of that train, no matter how much we hoped she would not."

— "Why My Favorite Characters to Write Are Often Unsympathetic and Unforgivable: Askold Melnyczuk on the Importance of Moral Complexity in Fiction," by Askold Melnyczuk, September 27, 2021.