Review: "Here After" by Amy Lin

Here After by Amy Lin
Published March 2024 via Zibby Books
★★★★

Amy Lin's husband was here, and then he went out for a run and was gone: unexpectedly dead at 32. Here After chronicles those first fresh waves of grief as she learned to navigate the world—and an unexpected health crisis of her own—as a young widow.

The book moves effortlessly between then and now—then, when they were healthy and in love and thought it would last forever, and now, when Lin came up against, over and over, her new reality.

When Kurtis has been dead two years, it is still an impossibility. If people ask me how long it has been, I say a year because that is how it feels. (loc. 1099*)

It is, for obvious reasons, not a particularly easy read. Lin had had her eye on a career as a writer even before her husband died, but this was never the book she wanted to write. There's an interesting bit early on regarding someone else's grief—a woman roughly Lin's age whose husband also died young, someone Lin didn't reach out to at the time because she didn't want to intrude on the other woman's grief. I have yet to realize silence only isolates the bereaved even more than death already has (loc. 216). A hard lesson to learn, but not a surprising one. (What surprises me is the 'friend', later in the book, who steps away from being supportive because they "have to protect [their] light" (loc. 452)—don't be that friend.)

The thing I like best is probably the fluid back-and-forth structure—I'm not sure if the before and after will be more visibly separated in the final print version (I read a digital ARC), but the fluid shifts from then to now and back again feel very fitting for the immediacy of grief. But be prepared for a read that is fully and fundamentally about grief and how it reshapes your entire existence.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.