Grief

A worn-out, jaded professor travels to the nation's capital to recover from the recent death of his mother, an invalid. There he finds a repressed, lonely landlord, and the mood and architecture of the city gradually reshape how he sees his loss. He also turns to the letters and journals of Mary Todd Lincoln, and what he discovers there offers new insight into America, yearning, loneliness, and mourning itself.

The publisher likens the novel to Michael Cunningham's The Hours. The author's first novel, Dancer from the Dance, appeared in 1978 and has remained continuously in print ever since. The Publishing Triangle ranked it fifteenth on its list of the hundred best lesbian and gay novels ever, alongside titles by Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. Grief is presented as a book that will reach a wider audience than any of the author's earlier work.