Good Grief!

I got this book as a Christmas present! The friends wouldn't know that I've been wanting to read this for a bit, but because tsundoku (in a list format), so I've never gotten around to actually doing so. Then the book went out of print. Arrrrgh. Then... the friends gifted it. Yay!! 

I wanted to read it because I enjoyed the editor's writing; we're also acquainted IRL, and he's really good conversationalist. It's 'Good Grief!: Everything I know about love, life and loss' (2016) by Alan John. It's filled with his stories, his experiences, and anecdotes of life, spanning 1981 to 2016. 

I read the opening chapters about the author and his wife themed 'Just the Two of Us'. She is referred to as 'Mrs J' in this book. I skipped the next eight chapters categorised into 'You Can Call Me Dad' and 'School? Help?' I'm really not interested in parenthood, babies, toddlers and how life has changed for anyone.  

I enjoyed the chapter 'At home in Kerala' under 'Roots'. He wrote about his first visit to Kerala in May 2005, where his grandparents were from, but he had no known relatives or friends living there anymore. Ahhh, visiting Kerala is on my rather short travel bucket list. I want to eat prawn theeyal and thoran in Cochin.

After going back three days in a row, I am ready to check into an ayurvedic ashram for the full 31-day life-changing experience complete with early-morning yoga, vegetarian meals, meditation and all.

My tendency to go to extremes is checked in time, thanks to having a return air ticket, a looming back-to-work date, and Mrs J's simple: "No."

The three chapters under 'Makan time' are fun too. They talk about nyonya food, achar awak, his Mama's turkey curry at Christmas, and the all-time favorite of pork vindaloo.

He wrote a brutally frank and honest four chapters about his relationship with his family in 'So Near Yet So Far Away'. They don't speak anymore, and he doesn't get along with his mother. I forgot about the articles he wrote back then about it, and I forgot why that happened. But I wasn't interested in the why. I was interested in how he dealt with it, and in 2016, he made whatever peace he could with himself about the situation. 

So here I am. Into my 60s, still not speaking to my mother and living with the likelihood that she may pass on and we would not have made up in time for me to attend the funeral.

It sounds pretty horrible, I know.

But for some of us, that's life.

The author has been a newspaper man all of his career. As a young reporter, he left his hometown in Malaysia and moved to Singapore and stayed on. He held that identity for 39 years straight. Then he left the industry in 2015. He doesn't want to be referred to as 'retired'. That's a dirty word to him. The connotations of it is simply... unthinkable. He likes to think of life after leaving the industry as an 'encore', a chance and time to do something different. He's gone through a heart attack, a change of diet and picked up jogging. If he's still alive, he's gotta live it. 

The very last part of the book is themed 'What I now know about', and it holds four pages of his short opinions about say, Pets, Family, Friends, etc. It's a great summary of what he believes at this point the book was written in 2016.