Reading Out Loud

I suppose I'm on a kick this month, but I'm going to another reading by an author I greatly admire this evening, and I couldn't be more excited. (I'm trying to plan for potential small talk in advance on this one. I really don't want to tell Ann Hood that I'm socially awkward or have her think that I'm mute.)

For those of you who haven't read Ann Hood, I highly recommend picking up one of her books. My personal favorites are her essays, which I will warn you in advance are both beautiful and tragic. Comfort is her newest book, and it is nonfiction.

Many of Ms. Hood's essays are on the subject of grieving her daughter, who passed away at the age of five. In her grief, Hood began knitting as a form of distraction and comfort. The Knitting Circle is a fictionalized account of a woman learning to knit while she grieves.

I discovered Ann Hood during a period of grief when I really was worried that I would not be able to write again. Finding Ann Hood's essay "Love Me Do" in The Honeymoon's Over: True Stories of Love, Marriage and Divorce was a gift to me, and it brought me what I needed most at that time -- someone who had the words that I didn't, and hope that if she could write something so lovely and touching after the pain she had endured, maybe, just maybe, I could write again, too.