The sub-genre of literary and very personal reckonings with grief includes works like the novel Someday, Maybe by Onyi Nwabineli, Tess Gallagher’s poetry in Moon Crossing Bridge, and the memoir Passing: A Memoir of Love and Death by Michael Korda. Of course, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is the masterpiece of the genre and, more recently, Daniel Wallace entered the category with This Isn’t Going to End Well.
Small Altars, by Justin Gardiner, is a distinctive new addition to this sub-genre. Gardiner recounts the challenging life of his brother, Aaron, who was born with a borderline learning disability, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in his twenties, and succumbed to a rare form of cancer at age forty-four.
Here’s my recent review of Small Altars for Alabama Writers’ Forum:
Professional Southerner 