Böcker av Donna McCart Sharkey

When her daughter died in November, 2013, she was a parent in search of consolation and looking for similarities to her situation. She began to read the obituary column of her local newspaper and although the author of A Death in the Family: Stories Obits Tell read extensively about death of an adult child, she found obituaries the most comforting and kept returning to them. Day after day, she became obsessed and discovered that obituaries were a specific genre in themselves. This book, written within the tradition of social history, follows a decade of obituaries from the point of view of one author and notices the gradual changes in content, context, and style. In clear and precise writing, Donna McCart Sharkey explores and finds the extraordinary within the captivating life stories - the brief biographies and at times, autobiographies - of the newly dead.

Donna McCart Sharkey and Arleen Pare , sisters and writers, have co-edited an anthology Don' t Tell: Family Secrets, about what may be hidden in families. For each individual, even in the same family, what is secret and what is not, may be different. In Don' t Tell: Family Secrets, fifty-nine writers tell their stories in either prose or poetry, of their own family secrets. So often, mothers bear the burden, stand over time as the keepers of these secrets, trying to keep families intact. Spanning continents, cultures, wars, belief systems, and the private lives of families, the secrets in this book range from over one hundred years ago to the present and include stories – some serious, others quirky, some resolved, and still others that remain a mystery.

The author anticipated building an ordinary family. And that's what happened. But mental illness and grief also happened, undermining the security of home and changing the familial experience from ordinary to extraordinary. A hard story to live, a hard story to read, this book describes the day-to-day life in a family navigating their increasingly fraught lives. A must read for any family who has experienced this and a must read for anyone wanting to know about this.