title: Comfort: A Journey Through Grief
author:  Ann Hood 
description: Starred Review. The first six pages of this wrenchingly honest memoir of Hood's daughter's death and its aftermath read like a tightly controlled scream. All the platitudes, the dozens of words of comfort that people offertime heals, she is in a better placeare interspersed with Hood's silent, furious responses to these lies, with special scorn for those who say, Are you writing this down? The death of her five-year-old Grace in 2002 was completely unexpected: an ordinary strep throat somehow ravaged the organs of her small body. Hood (<i>The Knitting Circle</i>) takes readers through the slow, jagged steps of dealing with grief. Unable to write, she first took refuge in endless knitting, then got a tattoo on Grace's sixth birthday. Hiding from the Beatles' songs her daughter had loved, she found them so ubiquitous that she could finally listen only to talk radio. Grace's little shoes stood sentinel at the top of the stairs and three years passed before Hood could bear to clean her room. But there is redemption at the end of this short, anguished book. Hood and her husband have a new daughter, Annabelle, adopted from China, and at last, Hood can celebrate Mother's Day, albeit with a strange mixture of grief and joy. <i>(May)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  ## Comfort
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## ALSO BY ANN HOOD
  
  FICTION
  
  Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine
  
  Waiting to Vanish
  
  Three-Legged Horse
  
  Something Blue
  
  Places to Stay the Night
  
  The Properties of Water
  
  Ruby
  
  An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life: Stories
  
  The Knitting Circle
  
  MEMOIR
  
  Do Not Go Gentle
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Comfort
  
  
  A JOURNEY THROUGH GRIEF
  
  
  ## Ann Hood
  
  
  ![image](Images/logo.jpg)  
  W. W. Norton & Company  
  New York • London
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Excerpt from “Wage Peace” by Judyth Hill. Copyright © 2001 by Judyth Hill.
  Used with permission.
  
  Copyright © 2008 by Ann Hood
  
  All rights reserved  
  
  
  First Edition
  
  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
  to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth  
  
  
  Avenue, New York, NY 10110
  
  Production manager: Anna Oler
  
  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
  
  Hood, Ann, 1956–  
  
  
  Comfort: a journey through grief/Ann Hood.—1st ed.  
  
  
  p. cm.  
  ISBN: 978-0-393-06864-1  
  1\. Grief. 2. Bereavement—Psyc