Book Review: Friend Grief and Anger: When Your Friend Dies and No One Gives a Damn

Friend Grief and Anger: When Your Friend Dies and No One Gives a Damn. Victoria Noe. King Company Publishing, May 3, 2013, Paperback and Kindle, 46 pages.

Reviewed by Kristina Winters

The loss of a friend is not always perceived as a respected or profound loss. Victoria Noe challenges that notion in Friend Grief and Anger: When Your Friend Dies and No One Gives a Damn by discussing “disenfranchised grief” that is often not validated or given the same social credence as the loss of a relative when, in fact, it arguably warrants the same level of attention.

Friend Grief and Anger is a somber read centered on the raw, angry emotion often felt when one loses a close friend. Noe focuses on various relationships and losses throughout her life as well as stories of loss experienced by individuals she knows. These examples allow the reader a different lens through which to view varying stages of grief, whether an individual’s departure is sudden, gradual, or perplexing in nature.

In one particular example, Noe highlights her own experience with losing her friend Delle Chatman to ovarian cancer, using this as an impetus to frame her personal anger at seeing Chatman shut out loved ones as she neared the end of her life. In the aftermath of Chatman’s death, the anger didn’t arise at the circumstances that took her life, but with the deceased herself, for not allowing close friends and family to support her through the end of her journey. Other stories focus on anger at incurable diseases or viruses, rage at incidents such as 9/11, or resentment toward perceived negligence, as was evident in the famous death of actor Vic Morrow who lost his life while filming Twilight Zone: The Movie. Director John Landis not only faced a manslaughter charge in Vic Morrow’s wrongful death case, but also faced the warranted wrath of mourners when he appeared at Vic Morrow’s funeral to deliver an unwelcome eulogy. These stories serve to validate the grieving process and provide insight into how the death of a friend rightfully merits anger, sadness, and appropriate time for healing.

What this book does well is allow the reader to understand that there is nothing wrong with experiencing grief in ways that are natural to the individual­—whether that grief is for someone close or a popular celebrity in the news, no one can dictate a socially acceptable response, or demand that one grieve in a way that is largely perceived as appropriate. Although it is not necessarily meant to be constructive, Friend Grief and Anger takes the reader for a walk in someone else’s shoes by exploring the concept that grief is real, regardless of its form, and that we are not alone in our feelings of anger, sadness, and disappointment when working to embrace the loss of a friend.