Beautiful Indignities

A heartrending yet bracing memoir of one woman’s quest to move through grief, from the New York Times bestselling author of Concussion

You could say it was because of her husband Alex that Jeanne Marie Laskas found herself in a hospital bed on a far-flung Greek island with a 104° fever—that this whole thing started four and a half years earlier, with his death. When Alex died, Jeanne Marie tried to do everything she was supposed to do to rebuild. She got a dog, she sold their farm, she watched their daughter walk down the aisle. But her grief wouldn’t budge. She was a widow who couldn’t even say the word widow, not exactly progressing through the stages of grief. Denial, it turned out, was her factory setting.

Now, four years after Alex’s death, she had developed what you might call a system—spending her nights obsessively watching a TV show about a widow who drags her kids to Corfu, and most of her days in a running (and, yes, imaginary) conversation with her dead husband. “You, my dear, are stuck,” he finally told her.

So, desperate to make a change, she figured: Why not spend the summer on that little Greek island? There, she’d finally be able to grieve. But things didn’t go quite according to plan. She wound up delirious in a hospital bed on Corfu, her new landlady holding vigil in the waiting room, her dead husband still talking in her ear—and her heart, against all odds, beginning to crack open.

Hilarious, wise, and deeply felt, The Curve of the Earth charts the long and winding path from sorrow to healing—and all the beautiful indignities in between. “Grief,” as Jeanne Marie writes, “is not the absence of love, but its persistence.”