To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time

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, orphan, 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.

Matthew Salesses is the author of The Sense of Wonder, the national bestseller Craft in the Real World, the 2021 finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, and two other novels. Adopted from Korea, he has written about adoption, race, and Asian American masculinity in The Best American Essays 2020, NPR’s Code Switch, the New York Times blog Motherlode, and The Guardian, among other media outlets. BuzzFeed has named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. He was previously Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech.

• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
  
• Publish Date: Dec 1, 2026
  
• Pages: 224 
  
• Language: English
  
• Type: Hardcover
  
• EAN/UPC: 9780316426015
  
• Dimensions: 8.3 in H | 5.5 in W