What fictional name did C.S. Lewis use for his 1961 book about grief?

C.S. Lewis used the fictional name N.W. Clerk for his 1961 book about grief, A Grief Observed. The pseudonym appeared on the book’s original publication.

Lewis wrote the work after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, from cancer in 1960. Rather than presenting a polished theological argument, the book records the shock, anger, doubt, loneliness, and questioning that followed bereavement. Its direct emotional tone made it different from Lewis’s more systematic apologetic works.

The pseudonym initially allowed Lewis to publish private reflections without making the book immediately identifiable as his own account. After his death, it became widely known that he had written it. The book is sometimes confused with Surprised by Joy, which is Lewis’s autobiographical account of his intellectual and spiritual development, not his meditation on bereavement.