What is the title of C.S. Lewis’s memoir about grief after his wife’s death?

A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis’s memoir about grief after his wife’s death. It was published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk.

Lewis wrote the book after the death of Joy Davidman, whom he married in a civil ceremony in 1956 and a Christian ceremony in 1957. Davidman died of cancer in 1960, and Lewis used the memoir to record his anger, doubt, loneliness, and changing understanding of suffering.

The book is unusually direct for Lewis because it does not present grief as a neat theological problem with an easy solution. Its short sections preserve the instability and emotional movement of mourning.

Readers sometimes assume the book was published under Lewis’s own name. The pseudonym initially concealed his identity, but the work was later identified as his and is now commonly discussed as an important account of bereavement.