The resources below have been selected to offer a variety of perspectives on grief—from practical guidance and guided reflection to memoir, daily readings, and honest conversations with people who have experienced significant loss.

There is no single book, podcast, or approach that is right for everyone. Consider these recommendations as invitations rather than assignments. Read or listen at your own pace, skip what does not resonate, and return to a resource later if the timing does not feel right.

★ Personally Recommended indicates resources that I especially recommend based on my own reading or listening.

Self-Help & Understanding Grief

Living When a Loved One Has Died — Earl A. Grollman

★ Personally Recommended

Rabbi Earl Grollman's classic is compassionate, straightforward, and refreshingly brief. Rather than prescribing a particular way to grieve, Grollman recognizes grief as universal while emphasizing that each person's experience is deeply individual. At only about 128 pages, it is especially approachable during a time when concentration and energy may be limited.

Best for: Short, accessible reading

View / Purchase Living When a Loved One Has Died

Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief — David Kessler

★ Personally Recommended

Grief expert David Kessler explores what he calls the "sixth stage" of grief: meaning. Drawing from decades of work with grieving people as well as the death of his own son, Kessler considers how meaning can eventually coexist with loss without requiring us to minimize, justify, or leave behind the person who died.

Best for: Moderate-length, accessible reading

View / Purchase Finding Meaning

It's OK That You're Not OK — Megan Devine

Megan Devine challenges many of our culture's assumptions about grief, particularly the idea that grief is a problem that needs to be fixed or overcome. Drawing from her professional experience and the sudden death of her partner, Devine offers a validating approach to learning how to live alongside profound loss.

Best for: Moderate-length, conversational reading

View / Purchase It's OK That You're Not OK

Be Light in Grief: Conscious Grieving for Self-Empowerment, Growth & Healing — Kathleen Papineau & Lisa Murphy

★ Personally Recommended

Be Light in Grief offers a hopeful, reflective approach to consciously engaging with grief while exploring healing, growth, and the continuing significance of love after loss. The authors are local (Southeastern Massachusetts) providers of mental health, holistic health and wellness!

Best for: Accessible, reflective reading

Purchase Be Light in Grief on Amazon

Workbooks & Guided Journals

Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief Workbook — David Kessler

★ Personally Recommended

A companion to Finding Meaning, this workbook turns Kessler's ideas into opportunities for reflection and active engagement. It offers exercises intended to help readers explore their own experience of loss, their continuing love for the person who died, and the possibility of discovering meaning within a changed life.

Best for: Structured exercises and reflection

View / Purchase the Finding Meaning Workbook

How to Carry What Can't Be Fixed: A Journal for Grief — Megan Devine

This illustrated grief journal provides writing prompts, creative exercises, self-care practices, and practical tools without imposing a timetable or suggesting that grief needs to be "fixed." Readers can move through it selectively rather than completing it from beginning to end.

Best for: Short exercises you can do at your own pace

View / Purchase How to Carry What Can't Be Fixed

The Understanding Your Grief Journal — Alan D. Wolfelt

A companion to Wolfelt's Understanding Your Grief, this journal uses guided questions to help readers explore their individual experience of loss. The current second edition contains approximately 200 pages but is designed for reflection rather than continuous reading.

Best for: Structured journaling in manageable sections

View / Purchase The Understanding Your Grief Journal, Second Edition

The Grief Recovery Handbook — John W. James & Russell Friedman

This longstanding workbook takes a more structured, action-oriented approach to unresolved feelings surrounding loss. Because its method is more prescriptive than some of the other resources on this page, readers may find that parts resonate strongly while others do not.

Best for: Readers who prefer a step-by-step workbook

Purchase The Grief Recovery Handbook

Memoirs & Personal Accounts

The Year of Magical Thinking — Joan Didion

★ Personally Recommended

Joan Didion's celebrated memoir chronicles the year following the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, while their daughter was critically ill. Didion captures something that conventional grief advice often cannot: the strange, disorienting logic of bereavement and the mind's difficulty accepting that someone is truly gone. The memoir is approximately 240 pages.

Best for: Moderate-length literary reading

View / Purchase The Year of Magical Thinking

A Grief Observed — C. S. Lewis

Written following the death of Lewis's wife, Joy Davidman, this short book records grief as it was actually being experienced rather than neatly explained afterward. Lewis wrestles openly with sorrow, anger, doubt, love, mortality, and faith. Because Christianity is an important part of Lewis's reflections, readers should know that it approaches grief from an explicitly faith-informed perspective.

Best for: Very short, reflective reading

Purchase A Grief Observed

A Heart That Works — Rob Delaney

Comedian and actor Rob Delaney writes about the illness and death of his two-year-old son, Henry, from a brain tumor. The result is raw, loving, angry, sometimes profane, and unexpectedly funny—a memoir that allows the absurd and the devastating to exist together.

Best for: Short-to-moderate, emotionally intense reading

Purchase A Heart That Works

Crying in H Mart — Michelle Zauner

Musician Michelle Zauner writes about losing her mother to cancer and the complicated relationship between grief, food, family, culture, and identity. Rather than functioning as a grief guide, the book offers the companionship of another person's beautifully told experience of bereavement.

Best for: Moderate-length, highly readable memoir

View / Purchase Crying in H Mart

Daily Readings & Meditations

Living with Loss, Healing with Hope: A Jewish Perspective — Earl A. Grollman

★ Personally Recommended

Grollman draws upon Jewish wisdom and tradition to explore mourning, memory, faith, and hope after loss. The book is brief—approximately 120 pages—and organized in a way that lends itself to reading slowly or returning to individual passages. Because the book is explicitly grounded in Jewish tradition, readers may want to consider whether that spiritual perspective fits what they are looking for.

Best for: Short, contemplative reading

View / Purchase Living with Loss, Healing with Hope

Grief One Day at a Time: 365 Meditations to Help You Heal After Loss — Alan D. Wolfelt

Wolfelt offers one short reflection for each day of the year. The format allows readers to spend just a few minutes with the book at a time rather than trying to concentrate on full chapters.

Best for: Daily bite-sized reading

Purchase Grief One Day at a Time

Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief — Martha Whitmore Hickman

★ Personally Recommended

A longstanding collection of brief daily readings for people living with loss. Its one-day-at-a-time format makes it easy to open the book wherever you are rather than feeling obligated to read it sequentially.

Best for: Very brief daily reflections

Purchase Healing After Loss

A Time to Grieve — Carol Staudacher

Organized around brief meditations on the experience of bereavement, Staudacher's book is designed to be taken slowly rather than read straight through. Readers can turn to individual reflections as needed.

Best for: Short, contemplative sections

Purchase A Time to Grieve by Carol Staudacher

Recommended Listening

Sometimes reading isn’t quite what you need. Often times hearing a person’s words in their own voice can be particularly powerful.

Podcasts can provide another way to hear from grief professionals and, just as importantly, from people who have experienced profound loss themselves.

Podcasts About Grief

All There Is with Anderson Cooper

★ Personally Recommended

Anderson Cooper began All There Is while sorting through the belongings of his late mother, Gloria Vanderbilt. The podcast grew into an unusually candid exploration of his own losses and conversations with others whose lives have been shaped by death. The result is personal rather than clinical: grief is explored through stories, questions, memories, and conversations about learning to live with loss.

Listen to All There Is with Anderson Cooper

Healing with David Kessler

★ Personally Recommended

David Kessler brings together his professional work in grief and his personal experience of loss for conversations about grief, trauma, healing, and life after loss. Guests bring additional personal and professional perspectives to the discussion.

Listen to Healing with David Kessler

Grief Out Loud — The Dougy Center

Hosted by Jana DeCristofaro and produced by the Dougy Center, Grief Out Loud combines personal stories, conversations with bereavement professionals, and practical discussions about supporting grieving children, teens, adults, and families.

Listen to Grief Out Loud

Terrible, Thanks for Asking — Nora McInerny

Writer and podcaster Nora McInerny became known for creating space for people to answer the question "How are you?" truthfully. The show extends beyond bereavement alone, but loss and grief are woven throughout many of its deeply human stories.

Listen to Nora McInerny's podcast and grief conversations

What's Your Grief Podcast — Eleanor Haley & Litsa Williams

Mental-health professionals Eleanor Haley and Litsa Williams take a practical, approachable look at life after loss. Episodes break subjects such as grief theory, coping, and everyday challenges into digestible topics, making this a particularly useful option for listeners who appreciate psychoeducation.

Listen to What's Your Grief Podcast

Episodes About Grief

Some of the most meaningful conversations about grief happen outside of grief-specific programs. These selected episodes feature people speaking candidly about bereavement, grief, love, relationships, identity, and learning to live in a world changed by loss.

Please Note: Not every episode here discusses grief/loss exclusively. You will likely hear other conversations if you listen to the entire episode. In some cases you may hear conversations about adult topics or will hear adult language dealing with adult themes. My inclusion of these episodes on this list is not necessarily an endorsement of the content of the entire episode.

Aubrey Plaza — Good Hang with Amy Poehler

★ Personally Recommended

In this August 2025 conversation with her longtime friend and Parks and Recreation costar Amy Poehler, Aubrey Plaza speaks publicly about living with grief following the death of her husband, filmmaker Jeff Baena, earlier that year. Plaza's description of grief as something enormous and ever-present is striking precisely because she is not presenting herself as an expert—she is describing what the experience feels like from inside it.

Listen to Aubrey Plaza on Good Hang — Apple Podcasts

David Kessler — ManTalks: “Finding Meaning in Grief and Loss”

★ Personally Recommended

A substantial hour-long conversation with David Kessler covering the five stages of grief, anger and unprocessed grief, identity after loss, learning to live again, meaning-making, and the death of Kessler's 21-year-old son. It is an excellent introduction to Kessler for someone who would rather listen to a conversation than begin with one of his books.

Listen to David Kessler: Finding Meaning in Grief and Loss

Andrew Garfield — Modern Love: “Andrew Garfield Wants to Crack Open Your Heart”

Actor Andrew Garfield has spoken movingly about the death of his mother, Lynne, from pancreatic cancer. In this Modern Love conversation, he explores the intertwined nature of love, joy, grief, and mortality through both his own experience and his work.

Listen to Andrew Garfield on Modern Love

Rob Delaney — WTF with Marc Maron

Comedian Rob Delaney speaks with Marc Maron about the illness and death of his young son Henry and what happens to a family after an unimaginable loss. The conversation is unusually frank about child loss, other people's discomfort around grief, and the inadequacy of trying to find the perfect thing to say to someone who is grieving.

A note for listeners: This is a candid conversation about the death of a child and may be especially emotionally intense.

Listen to Rob Delaney on WTF with Marc Maron

David Kessler — Ten Percent Happier: “Why We're All Grieving — and How to Deal With It”

This conversation with Dan Harris broadens the definition of grief beyond bereavement alone. Kessler discusses death loss alongside anticipatory grief and the loss of security, normalcy, and the life we expected to have. Although recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the ideas remain relevant to understanding grief more broadly.

Listen to David Kessler on Ten Percent Happier

A Note About These Recommendations

Books and podcasts can provide language, companionship, validation, and new ways of understanding grief, but no resource can tell you exactly how you should grieve. Grief is highly individual. A resource that feels deeply meaningful to one person may not resonate with another—and something that does not feel helpful today may feel very different six months or several years from now.

You do not need to finish a grief book simply because you started it. You do not need to agree with every idea an author presents. Take what is useful, leave what is not, and give yourself permission to engage with these resources in whatever way works for you.