Unveiling the Hidden Journey of Grief: Matthew Salesses’ Profound Exploration in ‘To Grieve is To Carry Another Time’
To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time (Little, Brown; Dec. 2026) goes farther and deeper, taking the doubling seriously as a subject. That the exploration comes from Matthew Salesses gives the book a particular charge: this is the author of Craft in the Real World, a writer who has taught us whose expectations shape a story. Readers of grief memoir will come for the subject; writers, adoptees, and anyone carrying an unfinishable loss should come too.
The memoir braids Salesses’ life — Korean adoptee, father, husband and, after her death from stomach cancer, widow to Cathreen — with an expansive constellation of other minds: physicists, philosophers, scholars, psychoanalysts, sociologists, theorists, and poets, each pulled in to help think what feels unthinkable. The narrative is divided into ten parts that arrive in 136 numbered small pieces; like the book’s examination of grief, the passages themselves are not presented in linear fashion. And as any griever knows, non-linear is precisely how our experiences of grief move.
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