Bertolt

Jacques Goldstyn

An uncommonly tender illustrated story of love, loss, and savoring solitude without suffering loneliness:

Turn: The Journal of an Artist

Anne Truitt

“I should have had more courage, dared, risked rejection, even ejection — naked, awkward, crouched as Eve in Masaccio’s Expulsion from Paradise. ‘Should’ is a dreadful auxiliary word, and worst when linked with ‘have’… I mourn what I did not know when I was married: the necessity for honesty between people if mutuality is to bud out of a status quo into air it can then fill with a new form.”

Artist Anne Truitt on love, loss, and what makes marriage work – one of the most beautiful and truthful things ever written:

Cry, Heart, But Never Break

Glenn Ringtved and Charlotte Pardi

A remarkable Danish illustrated meditation on life with and after loss:

M Train

Patti Smith

“The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.”

Patti Smith’s exquisitely beautiful elegy for the passage of time and how the radiance of love redeems the rupture of loss:

The Light of the World: A Memoir

Elizabeth Alexander

“Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss.”

Poet Elizabeth Alexander’s exquisite meditation on love, loss, and the boundaries of the the thing we call a soul:

Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

Anne Lamott

“The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?”

Anne Lamott on how we endure and find meaning in a crazy world – sublimely rewarding read: