How to Lose Everything, Christa Couture
How to Lose Everything, Christa Couture
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How to Lose Everything
A Memoir

Author: Christa Couture

Narrator: Christa Couture

Unabridged: 4 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/07/2021


Synopsis

Christa Couture has come to know every corner of grief—its shifting blurry edges, its traps, its pulse of love at the centre and the bittersweet truth that sorrow is a powerful and wise emotion. From the amputation of her leg as a cure for bone cancer at a young age to her first child’s single day of life, the heart transplant and subsequent death of her second child, the divorce born of grief and then the thyroidectomy that threatened her career as a professional musician, How to Lose Everything delves into the heart of loss. Couture bears witness to the shift in perspective that comes with loss, and how it can deepen compassion for others, expand understanding, inspire a letting go of little things and plant a deeper feeling for what matters. At the same time, Couture's writing evokes the joy and lightness that both precede and eventually follow grief, as well as the hope and resilience that grow from connections with others. Evoking Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Couture explores the emotional and psychological experiences of motherhood, partnership and change. Deftly connecting the dots of sorrow, reprieve and hard-won hope, How to Lose Everything contains the advice Couture is often asked for, as well as the words she wishes she could have heard many years ago. It is also an offering of kinship and understanding for anyone experiencing a loss.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Diwali on September 05, 2020

Finished this beautiful book in one day. It allowed me space to cry and feel beauty. Expertly and soulfully written, this book does justice to living with immense loss, including revisiting past events with more experienced eyes and tending to those events with the tools that time allows. My goodnes......more

Goodreads review by Bob on January 22, 2021

This memoir broke my heart, repeatedly, and made me think, constantly. Christa Couture takes the skill with words she honed as a singer-songwriter and applies it to the personal memoir genre to talk and think about her remarkable life, in which she loses a leg to cancer as a child and two children a......more

Goodreads review by Carys on August 11, 2020

As a writer and reviewer of books on loss and grief, How to Lose Everything is profound and I recommend it to anyone wishing to explore the depths of humanity and suffering. How do you lose everything? Christa Couture knows and she’s here to lovingly and ever-so-gently let you in on her hard-won wis......more

Goodreads review by Alexis on December 18, 2020

A gorgeous, honest, painful and quiet memoir about grief. Christa Couture has been through a lot- childhood cancer, the lost of two sons- and more losses, and she chronicles them in this series of essays. This is a beautiful, hopeful book.......more

Goodreads review by As You Wish on November 17, 2021

I cried. I laughed. I cried some more. I wept like a baby. It was so beautiful to read Christa's story of love and loss and love and loss and the courage to love again. A wonderful, difficult memoir that I'm a better person for reading. If you are afraid of grief, do not read. And probably if you're......more