Family Stories of Love and Loss: Carrie Etter, Cecile Pin and Julia Samuel MBE
by Rachel Hare
‘Lifelong I daughter’ writes Carrie Etter in her startlingly beautiful new poetry collection, Grief’s Alphabet (2024), which she will bring to Good Grief Weston on Saturday 12th October. The phrase reframes ‘daughtering’ as a doing word, an active state of loving and knowing love through all life’s changes – and even after bereavement. Described as an elegy for her mother, Carrie’s book opens with poems about her adoption at two weeks old and her childhood with her family, before moving on to contemplate the inexpressible pain of her mother’s sudden death, and the long process of grieving and facing life after loss. In an interview with Mark McGuiness, Carrie explains that she devised the three-part structure, because ‘no one would understand what that loss meant to me unless I also portrayed my relationship with her and what she had been, what she meant to me as a mother, as my best friend, really’. The resulting poems speak to the emotional complexity of grief, at times heavy with the weight of what has been lost, at others overflowing with joy and gratitude and love.
Family is also at the centre of Cecile Pin’s Wandering Souls (2023), which we will read for a very special Good Grief Weston Waterstones Book Club event. Longlisted for the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction, Cecile’s debut novel tells the story of three Vietnamese children adapting to life in 1980s Britain after unimaginable tragedy. The narrative is shot through with passages from the perspective of their five-year-old brother who died, in a vivid evocation of the Vietnamese superstition that people who die away from home do not leave for the afterlife but become ‘wandering souls’, restless and watchful. Cecile, whose own mother was a Vietnamese refugee, explains that the fragmented structure aims to capture the ways that family histories filter down the generations: we hear anecdotes, see photos, cherish memories and slowly begin to understand who we are in relation to those we love.
Good Grief Weston headliner Julia Samuel MBE is one of the UK’s leading experts in family dynamics. Her most recent book, Every Family Has a Story: How to Grow and Move Forward Together (2022), tells the stories of eight very different families who came to her for therapy during the pandemic, and explores the kinds of intergenerational trauma that Cecile describes as ‘carrying [her] mother’s grief’. As Julia explains, the ‘unresolved stressors of one generation can be passed down to intensify the daily pressures of life for the next’ until someone is ready to face and process the pain (p. 3). Families (both biological and chosen) are often where we love the most, and thus also where we can feel the most pain. Julia will be joined at Weston by her own family: her psychotherapist daughters, Emily and Sophie. The three star together on their popular podcast Therapy Works, which invites known and unknown voices into Julia’s therapy room and then reflects on the conversations with wisdom and warmth.
Read more about these book-based events on the Super Culture website!
Poetry Reading: Grief’s Alphabet by Carrie Etter (Saturday, 12th October, 14.00–15.00) https://superculture.org.uk/listings/good-grief-weston-griefs-alphabet
Waterstones Book Club: Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin (Thursday, 10th October, 16.00–17.30) https://superculture.org.uk/listings/good-grief-weston-waterstones-book-club-wandering-souls-by-cecile-pin
Understanding Grief, Loss and Change: In Conversation with Julia Samuel, Emily Samuel and Sophie Samuel (Friday, 11th October, 18.00–19.30) https://superculture.org.uk/listings/good-grief-weston-understanding-grief-loss-and-change-in-conversation-with-julia-samuel-emily-samuel-and-sophie-samuel