What title did C.S. Lewis give his 1961 book about grieving his wife?

A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis’s 1961 book about grief after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. Lewis originally published it under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk.

The book is composed of short, intensely personal reflections on bereavement, prayer, anger, doubt, memory, and the difficulty of reconciling suffering with belief in God. Its direct tone differs from Lewis’s more systematic apologetic works, making it a distinctive document of his later life.

Davidman died of cancer in 1960, and Lewis wrote the reflections while coping with the immediate aftermath. The text does not present grief as a simple spiritual lesson; instead, it records emotional instability and questions that remain unresolved from one entry to the next.

The author’s identity became known after publication, and later editions appeared under Lewis’s name. Readers sometimes confuse this book with The Problem of Pain, but that earlier work is a theological discussion written before Davidman’s illness and death.