Holly Wainwright

They're not scared by your pain because they have their own.

Grief is lonely because there's no true way to explain individual pain, but the grief club is the closest we have.

With my new membership, I started to notice the people in my life who'd been in the club for a long time, and our relationships deepened.

They could finally speak to me about their whole selves, not just the version they put on to show up on the days they didn't want to.

And as all these people began to materialize, I felt like an absolute moron for not realizing I'd been surrounded by members of the Grief Club my entire life.

You write about how you realised that even your parents were in the grief club.

Tell me a little bit, if you can, about the conversation you had about this with your mum because your parents come through so clearly in this book and they're the captains of practicality.

Yes.

And you say that you and your mum, fine relationship, but the way you characterise it a little bit is that

Now, your conversations, your check-ins, you haven't lived in the same place for a long time, are quite perfunctory and fact-based.

You write about how in those early weeks and months you couldn't sleep and you'd just go through your phone looking for somebody who might be awake in some time zone around the world who was in grief club in a way, who could talk to you in a way that you could understand, that you could just be together and not have to pretend.

So Katie was the person who got the running narration of your life.

You had your nothing calls, you had your relentless emails, you were like, this is what you're doing all the time.

It's almost like you must have seen yourself through her eyes and vice versa.

Who got that version of you when Katie was gone?

You quit your job.

I did.

Most of Katie's friends did it appears.

When you quit your job, your boss, I think, revealed that she was in the grief club, I think, during that conversation.

But she said Katie was too big and important not to change everything.