Good Grief (Winston)

Good Grief
Lolly Winston, 2004
Grand Central Publishing
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446694841

Summary
The brilliantly funny and heartwarming New York Times bestseller about a young woman who stumbles, then fights to build a new life after the death of her husband. 36-year-old Sophie Stanton loses her young husband to cancer.

In an age where women are expected to be high-achievers, Sophie desperately wants to be a good widow—a graceful, composed Jackie Kennedy kind of widow. Alas, Sophie is more of a Jack Daniels kind. Downing cartons of ice-cream for breakfast, breaking down in the produce section of supermarkets, showing up to work in her bathrobe and bunny slippers'soon she's not only lost her husband, but her job and her waistline as well.

In a desperate attempt to reinvent her life, Sophie moves to Ashland, Oregon. But instead of the way it's depicted in the movies, with a rugged Sam Shepherd kind of guy finding her, Sophie finds herself in the middle of Lucy-and-Ethel madcap adventures with a darkly comic edge. Still, Sophie proves that with enough humor and chutzpah, it is possible to have life after loss. (From the publisher.)

---

Summary
• Birth—November 15, 1961
• Where—Hartford, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., Bard College; M.F.A., Sarah Lawrence
  College
• Currently—lives in Northern California

With stints in journalism and public relations, plus an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College, Lolly Winston was an experienced writer before she penned her first novel. Still, her initial goal wasn't to write a bestseller — it was just to finish the manuscript. "Really, I just had the personal goal of finishing a novel before I turned forty," said Winston in an interview on her publisher's Web site. "Even if it was collecting dust in a drawer somewhere when I was on my death bed, I just wanted it to be finished."

The year before she turned forty, Winston took a hiatus from her other writing to complete Good Grief, the wry and touching story of a young woman coping with the death of her husband. Far from collecting dust in a drawer, Winston's novel flew off the shelves. It was chosen as a No. 1 Booksense pick and received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, where the reviewer wrote: "Throughout this heartbreaking, gorgeous look at loss, Winston imbues her heroine and her narrative with the kind of grace, bitter humor and rapier-sharp realness that will dig deep into a reader's heart and refuse to let go."

Good Grief renders the mourning process with such intimacy and accuracy that readers may wonder whether Winston herself is a widow. She isn't, but she did lose both her parents while she was still a young woman. "My father died when I was 29 and four years later my mother died," she explained on her publisher's Web site. "The day that my dad died I went out and bought a bathmat and a new lamp. Grief didn't hit me for a while. I even found myself resenting the mourners at our house. How could they accept his death so readily? I found grief like charging something on a credit card — you pay later, with interest. Months after my father's death I started breaking down. I remember sitting at my desk at work one day, unable to pick up my pencil."

After her depression began to subside, Winston realized she wanted to write about what grief was really like—including "the messy, quirky aspects of grief." Accordingly, the heroine of Good Grief sleeps in her late husband's shirts, eats Oreos by the package and drives her car through the closed garage door. She also struggles to keep living and moving forward, even though she can't at first imagine what her future will be like.

The result is a blend of pathos and humor that rings true for many readers. "Refreshingly, Winston has removed the sap factor that often makes these tales of lost love as gooey as Vermont maple syrup or as saccharine as an artificially sweetened Nicholas Sparks novel," noted a reviewer for USA Today.

In an essay on her publisher's Web site, Winston writes about "finding the comedy in tragedy":

I've always loved novels that are funny and sad at the same time. The Bell Jar, Lolita. If you go back and re-read those books, you rediscover their humor with surprise. Suicidal depression, funny? Pedophilia, funny? Somehow, yes. This seems to be where poignancy comes from—in finding the irony and humor in the worst things that happen to us in life.

Extras
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:

• My first job out of college, with a major in English, was as a breakfast cook at a Sheraton in Durham, North Carolina. You don't ever want to get burned with hot grits.

• I was the world's worst waitress—I spilled entrees, broke corks, mixed up orders. I was demoted, and that's how I wound up working in the kitchen and working various cooking jobs throughout college and grad school. This is an autobiographical part of Good Grief.

• When I was in my early 20s, I went to Hawaii for eight days and stayed for eight years. I learned to boogie board and dance the hula and barbecue in the wind without using any lighter fluid. My 20s were basically one long summer. Then I had to come home from camp and grow up and face the real world.

• My three cats are my writing companions. I cut and file my cats' nails, brush their teeth, and write songs for them. "Life's not too shi#*^, when you're a kitty!"  I'm embarrassed to admit that I've become a crazy cat lady.

• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here's her response:

Flannery O'Connor. I began reading her short stories when I was 15—around the time I started writing fiction. My first short story attempts were poor Flannery O'Connor imitations. (You can't write southern gothic fiction if you're from Hartford, Connecticut.) I think O'Connor is one of the best descriptive writers. I also like how she puts characters in extreme situations that serve to reveal their true natures. The way she blends horrifying and humorous details in the same story is brilliant. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble .)

---

Book Reviews
Good Grief...is capably rendered and extremely reader-friendly, but Ms. Winston's vision is too busy being ingratiating to make much of a mark.... Where Good Grief does have an authentic ring is in its intermittent descriptions of illness and loss. At such moments — as when Sophie looks at pictures of her husband and realizes "that photo paper, cardboard, leather and gold trim outlast most people" — a hint of bitter honesty does emerge. Her anger, however muffled, also flashes on occasion. "Fortunately he was a cautious driver," she writes about Ethan. "Still, as he looked both ways and stuck to the speed limit, malignant cells crept into his lymph nodes."
Janet Maslin - New York Times

Sophie's funny, lopsided view of the world gives emotional depth to the story, and it is what makes Good Grief stand out from other novels that tackle this enormous subject. Winston does not shy away from the pain of mourning, but she reminds us that we can still be funny, sarcastic, aware and smart, even when we are brokenhearted.
Ann Hood - Washington Post

A bright and terrifically funny writer.... With generous and welcome doses of wit, compassion, and originality, Winston deftly balances the inherent sorrow of life with effervescent humor.... Good job. Great book.
Miami Herald

"The grief is up already. It is an early riser, waiting with its gummy arms wrapped around my neck, its hot, sour breath in my ear." Sophie Stanton feels far too young to be a widow, but after just three years of marriage, her wonderful husband, Ethan, succumbs to cancer. With the world rolling on, unaware of her pain, Sophie does the only sensible thing: she locks herself in her house and lives on what she can buy at the convenience store in furtive midnight shopping sprees. Everything hurts—the telemarketers asking to speak to Ethan, mail with his name on it, his shirts, which still smell like him. At first Sophie is a "good" widow, gracious and melancholy, but after she drives her car through the garage door, something snaps; she starts showing up at work in her bathrobe and hiding under displays in stores. Her boss suggests she take a break, so she sells her house and moves to Ashland, Ore., to live with her best friend, Ruth, and start over. Grief comes along, too—but with a troubled, pyromaniac teen assigned to her by a volunteer agency, a charming actor dogging her and a new job prepping desserts at a local restaurant, Sophie is forced to explore the misery that has consumed her. Throughout this heartbreaking, gorgeous look at loss, Winston imbues her heroine and her narrative with the kind of grace, bitter humor and rapier-sharp realness that will dig deep into a reader's heart and refuse to let go. Sophie is wounded terribly, but she's also funny, fresh and utterly believable. There's nary a moment of triteness in this outstanding debut.
Publishers Weekly

After three years of a happy marriage, Sophie's husband dies from cancer, leaving her, in her thirties, with a big house in San Jose, no children, and the terrible grief that seems at first to destroy her. She leaves her Silicon Valley marketing job after a meltdown whereby she arrived at work wearing her robe and slippers and moves to Oregon, where a friend lives. In the course of the first year, amid the bouts of misery and loneliness, she meets new people, including a very disturbed 13-year-old girl, a handsome actor, and a homeless man she finds wearing one of her late husband's sweaters. The protagonist here is grief: all-controlling, all-pervasive, crushing grief that sometimes cycles through all its stages in 15 minutes, sometimes over months. Sophie's grief is unpredictable and impervious to counseling, medication, and the suggestions of friends and family. Recommended for public libraries. —Barbara Valle, El Paso P.L., TX
Library Journal

A Silicon Valley widow finds the healing power of befriending people worse off than she is. At 36, Sophie Stanton, recent widow of cancer-victim Ethan, finds her situation unbearable: she is lonely, depressed, prone to overeating, obsessed with wearing Ethan's ski sweater, and unable to function as PR manager for a California firm that manufactures a "scrotum patch." When Sophie arrives at work in her robe and slippers, she's granted a leave and moves near her separated friend Ruth, in Ashland, Oregon, which has an alternative Shakespeare Festival and available men. Like Bridget Jones, Sophie is made endearing by her many faults: her "hurricane hair," her weight-gaining tendency, her compassion for losers—like the men who try to pick her up—and her unconquerable hopefulness. In her new digs, demoted from waitress to "salad girl" at her bistro job, she finds a touching redemption in mentoring sassy-mouthed Crystal, a 13-year-old who's failing algebra, periodically cuts herself to relieve frustration, and is dismissed by her own mother as a freak. Yet a much-needed friendship sparks between the two, as well as between Sophie and a handsome local actor, Drew, as she comes into her own—invariably over the theme of food!—by opening a cheesecake shop and gaining a heroic autonomy. If all this sounds perfectly familiar, it is, as "women's fiction" assumes an increasingly hackneyed formula, led by the self-deprecating fat girl and packed with ebullient cheerleading and nary a truly dark or original moment. The characters are frothy, the dialogue chipper, the introspection restricted. Death becomes just another hurdle on the way to self-betterment—along with weight-management and resume-padding. Are women this desperate? Effervescent, silly debut: so eager to please that it reads like the speech of the candidate who won't open his mouth before the polls are consulted.
Kirkus Reviews

---

Book Club Discussion Questions
1. Clearly everyone doesn't go through the grieving process in the same way and at the same speed. What does Sophie's experience tell us about grief? How do Sophie and Marion differ when it comes to grieving? What aspects of Sophie's grief can you relate to? Are we sometimes too quick to tell people to "get over it," and move on with their grief? How might we be more comforting to those who are struggling with grief?

2. The theme of illness or decay extends beyond Ethan's death. At one point, Sophie says, "I look at the house and all I see is cancer." Her house then becomes literally much emptier than when Ethan was alive. Do you think that the death of a loved one casts a shadow on a living space? What other clues does the author give that Sophie must leave the house she shared with Ethan?

3. As a young widow, Sophie feels alienated at times from other widows and widowers in her therapy sessions, and among her friends. Does her youth make it more difficult for others to sympathize with her? Along these lines, does her youth make it harder for her to cope with Ethan's death?<

4. Crystal is one of the most intriguing characters in the novel in that she both provides comfort to Sophie and gets under her skin. Do you think Crystal helps restore a sense of control in Sophie's life, or does she take it away because she is so trying of Sophie's patience?

5. Low self-esteem is a huge problem for both Sophie and Crystal, but they cope with it differently. How does each character deal with their self-esteem and confidence issues? How does Sophie's experience with low self-esteem help Crystal overcome her cycle of self-destruction?

6. Sophie's mother dies when she is a young girl. Yet for someone who grew up without a mother, she demonstrates an incredible maternal instinct. Towards the end of Ethan's illness, Sophie was a caregiver. And at the end of the novel Sophie becomes a surrogate mother for Crystal and Marion (and even Drew in the last scene) — once again she is in the position of being a maternal caregiver. Is being a motherly-type figure therapeutic to Sophie? Does being a parental figure help Sophie overcome Ethan's death? Aside from her father's visit, do we ever see Sophie allowing herself to be taken care of?

7. At one point in the novel Sophie says, "Here's what happens in the movies: A single woman moves to a small town in the country to start over, and a rugged Sam Shepard kind of guy—lean and muscular, a cleft chin, and a thirty-three-inch waist in faded Levis's—finds her." Yet at the end of the novel she's involved with Drew, a handsome actor. Did you find that unbelievable or disappointing? Or did you think that was okay since clearly her knight on a white horse has already revealed that he has some commitment issues?

8. The concept of the non-traditional family manifests itself several times in the novel. After Ethan's death, Sophie finds herself with her father living 3,000 miles away and no other immediate relatives to turn to. By the end of the novel, how has Sophie's notion of a "family" changed? Who constitutes this new family? Can this new family fill the void that Ethan left?

9. Sophie clings to Ethan's possessions and becomes very attached to his ski sweater over the course of the story, almost personifying it. Finally, she decides to part with most of Ethan's belongings, even the sweater. Why is it so difficult to part with the physical things left behind when someone dies? Does wearing and holding onto this sweater help Sophie overcome Ethan's death, or does it impede her progress of moving on with her life? Is Jasper a good home for Ethan's sweater, or should Sophie have kept it?

10. Do you think the expression "good grief" is apt? Is a grieving period necessary in order to recover and move on? And do you think someone ever moves on from a loss such as one that Sophie experienced?

11. The notion of loyalty and commitment comes up throughout the book: Sophie's loyalty towards Ethan and her guilt about starting a new relationship with Drew, Ruth's commitment to her failed marriage and reluctance to let it go, even Marion, with her Alzheimer's, maintains a committed belief that Ethan is alive. When is it okay to acknowledge that something—a relationship, a person—has died and that the person left behind can start anew?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)