Godmothers Gather: Danielle Crittenden

Journalist and author Danielle Crittenden joins us to share “Dispatches from Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable,” her luminous memoir in which she chronicles not just the shattering impact of a child's death, but the strange afterlife of grief itself.

On a February morning, Danielle’s world cleaved in two: the life before her daughter Miranda was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment, and the life after. In this luminous memoir, Crittenden maps the territory of profound loss with the clarity of a foreign correspondent filing reports from a country no parent ever wishes to visit.

With unflinching honesty and unexpected grace, “Dispatches from Grief” considers how grief infiltrates grocery stores and social media, transforms old friendships and forges new ones, and ultimately reshapes the mourner as fundamentally as it has reshaped the world.

Here is grief in all its terrible specificity: the police call that changes everything, the surreal task of choosing a burial dress, the well-meaning friends who offer advice about “stages” that don't exist. But here too is love in its most distilled form—a mother’s meditation on a daughter who commanded dinner tables at twelve, who once interviewed Dick Cheney with a child’s notebook, who transformed from a precocious girl into a sparkling young woman living her dreams in New York.

Danielle brings a journalist’s eye to the landscape of loss, coining the perfect term for those who try to explain grief to the grieving (“griefsplaining”), finding dark comedy in a hotel clerk's relentless cheerfulness, and discovering that C.S. Lewis told more truth about mourning in seventy-three pages than a library of self-help books. She writes of joining what she calls “the alternative universe”—parents who have lost children—and of the terrible wisdom its members share.

For those walking through their own valleys of grief, this book offers not false comfort but true companionship. For those who love someone who is grieving, it provides a window into a world that can only be understood from within. And for all readers, it serves as a reminder that our time with those we love is both more precious and more precarious than we dare imagine.

This event will be hosted in our third-floor loft, which is only accessible by stairs.

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Please note: Out of respect for our authors and other guests—and to ensure everyone's safety—the front door will be locked 15 minutes after the event starts.

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This is a ticketed event.

TICKET OPTIONS INCLUDE:

// TICKET + BOOK includes one entry + one copy of the book, which will be handed out at check-in the night of the event.

// TICKET ONLY includes one entry.

// OPENING ACT tickets are lower-priced spots for early birds. They’re limited in number, and when they’re gone, they’re gone, so get them while they last.

Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.

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