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In suburban Philadelphia, Danielle Ariano spends much of her childhood attempting to imitate her older sister, Alexis: the way she dresses, speaks, even the way she stands when she smokes. But at the tender age of twelve, Ariano witnesses Alexis’s first suicide attempt, a harrowing event that foreshadows a tumultuous three-decade journey marked by thirteen such acts.

The Requirement of Grief lays bare the relationship between two sisters and the bond that remains in the wake of a suicide. With raw honesty and eloquence, Ariano chronicles her pursuit of healing in the face of loss, traversing the depths of grief day by day, month by month, and year by year, all the way to the birth of her son. As the unparalleled joy of motherhood intertwines with her grief, she grapples with the disorienting experience of having love and sorrow bind together. 

In a profoundly moving account that captures the duality of human experience, Ariano puts grief under a microscope, dares to bring it into sharp focus and then watches how it transforms over time.