Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

Wave

Wave is a memoir by Sonali Deraniyagala about the loss of her sons, husband, best friend, and parents in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

I was compelled to read this almost by strange stroke of fate. I had gone down a rabbit hole looking things up online doing grief research and someone mentioned it off hand in a comments section, and about five hour later I had bought and read the whole thing. I am putting this under the book review area, but really it could just as easily belong under psychology if I wanted to really delve into this work as a piece about grief. But I think I’d rather do Sonali Deraniyagala the service of making this about her. There’s this terrible urge to be magnanimous when we talk about grief and not focus on the individual shapes that grief takes. There was a review I came across while hyperfixating on this story that called Wave an unsentimental account of…I’ll stop there. What the fuck does that mean? This book is dripping with sentiment, just not in the preconceived Victorian tinted melodrama of loud wailing for prescribed lengths of time, as though your loved ones will stop being dead in six months. This book is an absolutely beautifully written account about an unimaginable amount of suffering and this woman somehow is still alive. Surviving a cataclysmic event does not end with the event, and Wave illustrates that very honestly. 

One of the things Deraniyagala discusses that most stuck with me is this notion of….when do you tell someone? How do you explain to someone new, someone you haven’t seen in a long time who asks how you’ve been, ‘oh, uh, well actually’. Wave talks a lot to the isolation that comes with trauma and the uniqueness of individual experience, because it’s individuals that are being lost.