James Tata recommended Mary Allen, specifically pointing out her book The Rooms of Heaven : A Story of Love, Death, Grief, and the Afterlife. According to James, "Much of the coverage of Joan Didion's recent The Year of Magical Thinking concentrated on the rarity of grief being accurately depicted in literature, and on the resemblance of grief to madness; Allen's memoir anticipates Didion's by half a decade, and her account of trying to contact her dead lover through the devices of Spiritualism becomes a harrowing metaphor for the intolerability of love's loss."
More about Mary Allen
+ Writers' Corner page at NEA
+ Booklist review of The Rooms of Heaven
+ Excerpt from The Rooms of Heaven
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