For January, our library book club read was a bit of a heavy one: Susie Boyt’s 2021 novel, Loved and Missed, published in the US by New York Review Books in 2023. This book is filled with grief and sorrow as it traces the long, painful ramifications of addiction and caregiving across years of family life.

And yet reading Loved and Missed felt oddly uplifting, for me, at least. For others in the group, particularly those who were reading something closely related to their own experience, it was not. Boyt’s attentiveness to painful experience — to the shame, regret, and sorrow people carry while still yearning for a glimmer of hope or simple connection — felt humane in a way that was genuinely enriching.

The book is narrated by Ruth, a single mother whose adult daughter, Eleanor, has become addicted to drugs and, by the time the novel begins, is more or less estranged but for a few encounters, maybe, over a holiday. It is at one such Christmas encounter that Eleanor tells Ruth that she is expecting a baby:

I saw a sudden brightness in her eyes and then I flung my arms around her. ‘What do you need?’

Ruth may briefly hope that Eleanor’s pregnancy will offer a turning point, but it quickly becomes clear that Eleanor is not going to raise her child. Ruth steps in and begins caring for her granddaughter, Lily, entering her sixties and eventually her seventies with so much grief and love she is worried she will misapply.

I love how Boyt explore the slow, often uncertain rhythms of living such a life, day after day. How does one continue with so much grief, anger, and despair? And what do those painful emotions reveal about the aching love beneath them?

Ruth is an intriguing narrator as well. She is loving and grieving, but also proud, defensive, imperfect. I knew early on that I would enjoy hearing her voice. For example, in the first chapter, when Ruth is with friends and one of them mentions having seen Eleanor and asks how they might help Ruth; Ruth reflects: “I couldn’t see their needing to help me was my problem, quite.” The line captures Ruth’s resistance to consolation, her prickliness. It also suggests her shame, regret, and sorrow, which she hates putting on display.