What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons with Ponzichter Zweigelt Blend

For those of you who’ve been following along with these pairings for the past year, you may have noticed certain threads pulling throughout the selections: some loud, some quiet, or in the case of this month’s novel What We Lose, direct. I don’t often realize what I am looking for when reading until much later, or perhaps never as directly as I think I should, but Clemmons’ novel could be a thesis of sorts on the ways in which grief transforms—identity, time, and narrative itself, and the ways we grow to fill it. With novels we often want a clarity that life rarely presents: the narrative terms we’re taught to label on a curve in school; things like Conflict and Resolution often still inform the way I read. Clemmons’ novel asks us to not only look directly at her subject, perhaps sometimes too directly, but she asks her readers to set aside any notions of resolution. Grief never ends. Anyone who has lost someone close to them knows this; and yet, perhaps, we search for it in novels b