Which book contains C.S. Lewis’s account of his wife’s death and his grief?

A Grief Observed contains C.S. Lewis’s account of his wife’s death and his grief. The book was published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk, about a year after Joy Davidman died of cancer in 1960.

The work is a series of reflections rather than a conventional autobiography. Lewis records anger, doubt, loneliness, and the struggle to reconcile suffering with belief in a loving God. Its directness surprised some readers because Lewis does not present grief as a tidy spiritual lesson or a problem solved by abstract arguments.

Lewis originally used a pseudonym partly because he wanted readers to encounter the book without treating it as a famous author’s public statement. After his death, the work was republished under his own name. It is now one of his most widely read books on bereavement.

The title is sometimes confused with The Problem of Pain, an earlier theological work published in 1940. The two books approach suffering very differently: The Problem of Pain is systematic and argumentative, while A Grief Observed is personal, immediate, and shaped by Lewis’s experience after Davidman’s death.