Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body is a heartbreaking story about someone dealing with grief. The narrator is trying to find their way back into society, but they don’t know where they belong. Even at the end of the novel, the narrator feels a deep sense of regret for leaving their beloved, and also stuck because they could not find their love when returning back home. The end of the novel shows how grief does not end and will always be a part of you. I really connected to this novel because I know what it feels like to have someone you love be diagnosed with an illness that will take them away from you. I think in that sense, this book can be very relatable to a lot of people, even if the person is not a romantic partner. I thought a lot about my mom while reading this story and how I also did similar things as the narrator did. The narrator went to the library and studied everything they could about their beloved’s illness. They also tried to distract themselves in work, or finding other people to hang out with. These are all things that I also went through.
I watched City of Joy recently, which is about a center in the Democratic Republic of Congo that is dedicated to women who have been raped. This center is to help the women recover both physically and mentally. This was a completely different circumstance, but the healing process still uses those 5 stages. The women eventually would reach acceptance in the center, being surrounded by women like them and learning how to defend themselves. Watching this movie right before I read this novel really showed the difference in healing processes and how the stages of grief present themselves.
When the narrator returned home at the very end of the novel, it reminded me of stages of grief. I didn’t really pick it up while I was reading it, but reflecting on it now I feel like I could pick out the different stages of grief that the narrator went through. At the end of the story, it felt like acceptance that they would never see each other again.
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