Grief is the Thing with Feathers

Max Porter (b. 1981) is an English writer and editor. He studied art history as an undergraduate at the Courtauld Institute of Art before receiving his master’s degree in radical performance art, psychoanalysis, and feminism from the same institution. Prior to writing and releasing his own work, Porter worked as the editorial director at Granta, where he was responsible for the publication of notable works such as Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (originally published in Korean in 2004) and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013). In 2015, his debut novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, was released.

Following the publication of Grief, Porter has released three novels: Lanny (2019), The Death of Francis Bacon (2021), and Shy (2023). Lanny, a magical realist story set in an English village, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Katy Waldman, a New Yorker culture writer, characterized his work as follows:

Porter’s […] books intertwine two characteristically British genres: the delinquent-youth novel […] and the magical-child novel […] Porter is drawn to moments of extremity and confusion, in which feelings commingle with their opposites. He may be contemporary fiction’s bard of ugly beauty and exultant despair (Waldman, Katy. “Max Porter’s Novel of Troubled and Enchanted Youth.” The New Yorker, 6 May 2023).

Grief marks his first attempt at exploring many of these themes. The boys’ grief over the loss of their mother often manifests in violent urges and apathy. Crow serves as a supernatural guardian who steers the family through the grieving process, and the ending of the book presents itself as a double-edged sword; as Dad and the boys attain enough closure for Crow to leave, they also have to let go, to some degree, of their connection with Mum. There is also ambiguity regarding whether Crow is a supernatural force or a product of Dad’s imagination, conjured from his own interpretation of Ted Hughes’s work. The book thus teeters on the edge between magical realism and simple literary fiction, allowing Porter to play with form and narrative structures in ways he might not have been able to if he had placed the novel more firmly in one box.