This book is a little wonder—a clear, utterly courageous act of love.”
—ELLE
“If you’ve ever known loss so cataclysmic that you want not stories of hope or survival, but ones that cry out in their brokenness—if you are looking for a place to meet your own pain or perhaps feel less alone with it—Here After might be the companion you need.”
—Esquire
“As the author navigates the wake of her inexplicable loss, readers will be both humbled by and grateful for the way she brings us into her world. A beautifully visceral and emotionally intimate depiction of young widowhood.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Lin’s memoir dazzles. Each chapter breathes with urgency…The tension between immediacy and memory lends the book an etherealness despite its raw, human vulnerability…written in poetic, fragmented chapters that convey how deeply people want to find words for what’s wordless, to discover meaning in the meaningless.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Told in short, poetic vignettes that stun in their depth, love, and pain. It's heartbreaking, beautiful, and above all, honest with . . . a small light of hope. Highly recommended.”
—Booklist (starred review)
"Lin's performance of her memoir, told in vignettes of meeting and losing Kurtis, is so staggeringly beautiful that it will break your heart . . . Lin teaches us, or reminds us, that sitting with someone in their sadness is far more helpful than a futile attempt to distract someone from their grief."
—Audiofile
"Amy Lin’s book is one of the best memoirs and books about grief that I’ve read."
—Susan Blumberg-Kason, Cha Journal
“It has been years since I have been so rocked, so moved, by any book, as I have been by Here After by the earthquaking new talent Amy Lin. Lin invites us into this place of exquisite pain and beauty; what a great gift she has given us.”
–Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
"Amy Lin’s debut memoir is a testament to everything beautiful and heartbreaking and necessary in this world. With sheer precision and unflinching candor, she shares the depths of love and loss, hope and healing. Not since Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking has a book cracked open my heart the way Here After has."
—Debbie Millman, author of Why Design Matters and host of Design Matters
"Here After is stunning–in the sense of leaving me stunned. I've never read a book that so directly translated grief into language. It is beautiful, crushing, and amazing, and I read it in a single breathless sitting.”
—Catherine Newman, author of We All Want Impossible Things
“How gorgeously Here After tackles the twin specters of grief and survival; a steely, symphonic memoir of unexpected loss—and what (necessarily, unbearably) comes next.”
—Carmen Machado, author of In the Dream House
“Here After is a searing account of a young couple’s lost future and a writer’s descent into the soul-ravaging, shape-shifting wilderness of grief. Amy Lin writes with devastating clarity about the wounds that do not heal, the stories that remain forever fractured, and love’s enduring force. This is a profound and essential memoir.”
–Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
"Here After is perfectly titled. Amy Lin's memoir of love and loss is heartbreaking and true. Having navigated my own path through grief, there was much I could identify with within these pages. Lin's writing is vivid, episodic, and unflinching—much like grief itself."
–Shannon Leone Fowler, author of Traveling With Ghosts
“Amy Lin knows her way around grief and its constant present tense. Grief is always with us; here are words to go with it, a writer who will accompany you on its long walk. This book made room for my tears and it will make room for yours if you let it.”
—Matthew Salesses, author of Craft in the Real World
★ 2023-11-17
A debut memoir about all-consuming grief.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Lin’s husband, Kurtis, died suddenly while participating in a virtual half-marathon, with no identifiable cause of death. In this powerful exploration, the author poignantly translates the depths of her grief, its steady beat of pain, and its ever attendant tears. While navigating her husband’s cremation and memorial, Lin also learned that she was facing her own threatening health condition. Thus, during the early days of her widowhood, she had to deal with her own treatments and recovery. She recounts this time period in short, deceptively simple sections, laying bare the searing emotion and absurd logistics that filled the days, months, and years that followed her husband’s death. The author masterfully intertwines these sections with vignettes depicting her life and relationship with Kurtis, from their first dates through mundane meal prep during marriage. These scenes also are open and stripped down, arguably as tender as the passages about grief, exposing an abiding, all-absorbing love. “Everyone is so afraid of grief,” writes Lin, “and this fear is dangerous to the grieving.” While this text does not remove that fear—indeed, it may compound readers’ discomfort by making the blistering agony of another person’s loss so unavoidable—it does reveal the danger of not holding space for the bereaved. In allowing herself to sit in both the sadness and the beauty of her love story, and inviting readers into her isolation, Lin stakes a claim on empathy that is not about regaining strength and moving on, but rather about merely surviving by opening a window that prevents acute grief from exploding. As the author navigates the wake of her inexplicable loss, readers will be both humbled by and grateful for the way she brings us into her world.
A beautifully visceral and emotionally intimate depiction of young widowhood.
