Marcy Kelly w/ Colin Campbell, "The Porcelain Heart: A Mother's Memoir of Unexpected Loss"

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Grief has a social problem: everyone wants to help for about three weeks, and then the casseroles stop and the thing itself is still there, permanent, and you learn to stop mentioning it at parties. Books like this exist for the part after the casseroles. Kelly has written about losing a child, and she is in conversation with Colin Campbell, who lost two and then wrote the book that a lot of bereaved parents in this city hand to each other. That pairing is the whole point and it is not accidental - these events function as something closer to a meeting than a reading, and the people who come are frequently carrying the same thing. It is not a comfortable evening and it is not meant to be. Free, Wednesday at seven, a narrow aisle in a bookstore on Sunset with thirty chairs in it. If you are the person everyone has stopped asking about, or you love someone who is, this is a room where you would not have to explain yourself.