How to Be Wretched - Growth from Grief That Won't End

The powerful and redemptive story of a woman’s journey to understand her profound grief and the science that helped her to overcome it

During her late teens and twenties, Jillian Dunham lost everyone in her immediate family. Her grandfather (to cancer), both grandmothers, her father (to alcoholism), and her mother (to malignant melanoma), to whom she was closest. But rather than work through this profound grief—the “moving on” from loss that people talk about—Dunham found herself mired in feelings that she could neither control nor escape.

When she realized that she was tired of feeling trapped and that the traditional therapies she had used weren’t helping, Dunham turned to her skills as a journalist. She began to explore what scientists are learning about deep grief and what is now called “prolonged grief disorder”—grief that persists for more than a year. She learned how grief rewires our brains, how it changes the hormones our body releases, and how it affects the ways our muscles react. These insights prompted her to see her own grief differently and to seek a new way forward. Eventually she found the right treatments that allowed her to move out from under her own grief and to have a clearer sense of what it did to her.

How to Be Wretched is the powerful personal story of one woman’s transformative struggle to move beyond her own debilitating grief. Combining memoir and reportage, and drawing from a wide range of sources—from the writings of Seneca to new neuroscience—it is both an eye-opening journey and a compelling read.