To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time, Matthew Salesses
To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time, Matthew Salesses
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To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time
A Memoir

Author: Matthew Salesses

Narrator: Matthew Salesses

Unabridged: TBD

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/01/2026

Synopsis

From the critically acclaimed author of The Sense of Wonder and Craft in the Real World comes a deeply personal, poignant memoir, weaving together Salesses' multiple identities: adoptee, Asian American, husband, father, and, finally, widower. Matthew Salesses has spent his career writing about the power of storytelling, but he wasn’t prepared for the story of his own life to fall apart. A Korean American adoptee, Salesses grew up unsure of who he was—until he fell in love and started a family with a native Korean, Cathreen. But when Cathreen was diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer, the map they made together suddenly led nowhere. After her untimely death, Salesses realized he would need new paths, new stories, new philosophies, new ways of understanding the world, to navigate the unknown landscape of loss. To Grieve Is To Carry Another Time is a stunning, thought-provoking meditation on what grief can offer the grieving, illuminating the way to embracing yourself, finding your community, and even loving and changing the world.

About Matthew Salesses

Matthew Salesses was adopted from Korea when he was two. He has written about adoption, race, and grief for NPR, the New York Times, the Guardian, VICE, and other publications. He is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the writing guide Craft in the Real World and the PEN/Faulkner shortlisted novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. He lives in New York with his two kids and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.

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Quotes

"To Grieve Is To Carry Another Time is a stunning and wholly unique exploration of grief as an entire, ever-changing universe that lives within a person and every place they touch. Matthew Salesses has done incredible work to ask readers to look closely at all of the moving parts that exist not just in loss, but also in its aftermath: guilt, anxiety, frustration, longing. All of the parts that make up the machine. This is a special, impressively honest and vulnerable book."—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year and A Little Devil in America

“An exquisite jewel of a book that held me captive from start to finish. Salesses's prose gleams on every page—at turns philosophical and wrenching, always full of wisdom, intelligence, and heart.”—Melissa Febos, national bestselling author of Girlhood and The Dry Season

"To Grieve Is To Carry Another Time is an examination of grief in its profound complexity, centering Salesses’s deeply felt lived experience within an expansive constellation of scholars, novelists, poets, sociologists, memoirists, anthropologists, neurophysiologists, middle-grade and picture book authors, literary and cultural critics, and philosophers. Its structure is perfection and his scene work precise. Grief is born of pain, and we feel it in these pages (there is a single sentence so devastating I felt my body break). Grief is also, Salesses argues, desire. And love. As someone wrestling with my own seemingly impossible grief—and hell, aren’t we all?—Salesses is a north star, a challenge to be better, and permission to save my own life, and we need such a balm and such a voice."—Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

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