I go around saying that every good story is a story about grief, without knowing if it is actually true. I’m no academic, not one to survey the entirety of English-language literature to see if I can back that up. But it seems true to me that at the heart of a good story is loss or the threat of loss. It seems to cut across genres. What would the movie Mrs. Doubtfire be without the loss of family? Every romantic comedy is about love lost (or longed for), found, almost lost again, and then found. The Man Booker Award-winning novel this year is George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo that imagines the grief of Abraham Lincoln at the death of his son Willie. The best example came in 2016: “This I
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