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Do we really need closure after bad things happen?

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9781439905760

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Closure examines how contemporary Americans - with their inalienable right to pursue happiness - have created a new emotion to help themselves deal with disappointment, loss, and grief. The need to find closure can justify forgetting or remembering, moving on or getting even, to say nothing of making a buck. Sprinkled with examples that range from hilarious to heartbreaking, this book explores closure's many meanings and uses. Joel Best, University of Delaware, author of Everyone's a Winner: Life in Our Congratulatory Culture

Closure examines how contemporary Americans - with their inalienable right to pursue happiness - have created a new emotion to help themselves deal with disappointment, loss, and grief. The need to find closure can justify forgetting or remembering, moving on or getting even, to say nothing of making a buck. Sprinkled with examples that range from hilarious to heartbreaking, this book explores closure's many meanings and uses. Joel Best, University of Delaware, author of Everyone's a Winner: Life in Our Congratulatory Culture [C]ompelling...Berns, who experienced a profound loss when she gave birth to a stillborn son, is here to reinforce what most of us intuitively know: feeling bad about losing a loved one never really ends. By commodifying the concept of closure in order to sell products and services, however, society has put pressure on us to conform to the prevailing 'feeling rules,' suggesting that disappointment, loss, and grief can and should come to an arbitrary end. Berns angrily dismisses this notion... VERDICT Berns wisely counsels us to find other language and perspectives for living with grief, and this lucid debunking of the current use of the word 'closure' is a breath of fresh air, recommended for both general readers and specialists. Library Journal It's wrong, [Berns] argues persuasively, to expect everyone else to follow a formulaic 'healing process' aimed at 'moving on.' As Berns reminds us, 'You do not need to close pain in order to live life again. Reason magazine, October 2011 Berns is strongest when she examines how closure gets taken up and used in interests in politics, media, the criminal justice system and, most convincingly, industry, in order to make a profit on people's pain and suffering. Indeed, Berns' ability to intersect a cultural analysis of closure with a critical justice analysis is powerful and compelling. It is here where she offers a unique analysis and where her meta-view as a sociologist crosses with her personal experience as a mourner to provide insight into how closure gets taken up in various cultural domains with ensuing negative consequences for the mourner. Mortality, June 20th 2012

Closure examines how contemporary Americans - with their inalienable right to pursue happiness - have created a new emotion to help themselves deal with disappointment, loss, and grief. The need to find closure can justify forgetting or remembering, moving on or getting even, to say nothing of making a buck. Sprinkled with examples that range from hilarious to heartbreaking, this book explores closure's many meanings and uses. Joel Best, University of Delaware, author of Everyone's a Winner: Life in Our Congratulatory Culture [C]ompelling...Berns, who experienced a profound loss when she gave birth to a stillborn son, is here to reinforce what most of us intuitively know: feeling bad about losing a loved one never really ends. By commodifying the concept of closure in order to sell products and services, however, society has put pressure on us to conform to the prevailing 'feeling rules,' suggesting that disappointment, loss, and grief can and should come to an arbitrary end. Berns angrily dismisses this notion... VERDICT Berns wisely counsels us to find other language and perspectives for living with grief, and this lucid debunking of the current use of the word 'closure' is a breath of fresh air, recommended for both general readers and specialists. Library Journal

Closure examines how contemporary Americans - with their inalienable right to pursue happiness - have created a new emotion to help themselves deal with disappointment, loss, and grief. The need to find closure can justify forgetting or remembering, moving on or getting even, to say nothing of making a buck. Sprinkled with examples that range from hilarious to heartbreaking, this book explores closure's many meanings and uses. Joel Best, University of Delaware, author of Everyone's a Winner: Life in Our Congratulatory Culture [C]ompelling...Berns, who experienced a profound loss when she gave birth to a stillborn son, is here to reinforce what most of us intuitively know: feeling bad about losing a loved one never really ends. By commodifying the concept of closure in order to sell products and services, however, society has put pressure on us to conform to the prevailing 'feeling rules,' suggesting that disappointment, loss, and grief can and should come to an arbitrary end. Berns angrily dismisses this notion... VERDICT Berns wisely counsels us to find other language and perspectives for living with grief, and this lucid debunking of the current use of the word 'closure' is a breath of fresh air, recommended for both general readers and specialists. Library Journal It's wrong, [Berns] argues persuasively, to expect everyone else to follow a formulaic 'healing process' aimed at 'moving on.' As Berns reminds us, 'You do not need to close pain in order to live life again. Reason magazine, October 2011

[C]ompelling...Berns, who experienced a profound loss when she gave birth to a stillborn son, is here to reinforce what most of us intuitively know: feeling bad about losing a loved one never really ends. By commodifying the concept of closure in order to sell products and services, however, society has put pressure on us to conform to the prevailing 'feeling rules,' suggesting that disappointment, loss, and grief can and should come to an arbitrary end. Berns angrily dismisses this notion... VERDICT Berns wisely counsels us to find other language and perspectives for living with grief, and this lucid debunking of the current use of the word 'closure' is a breath of fresh air, recommended for both general readers and specialists. -Library Journal

Author Information

Nancy Berns is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Drake University in Des Moines. Her teaching and research interests are in areas of grief, death, violence, justice, and social constructionism. She is the author of Framing the Victim: Domestic Violence, Media and Social Problems.

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