Book Review: A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

You’re standing at the graveside. The pastor has said his words. The dirt has been thrown. People are shaking your hand and saying things like “She’s in a better place” and “God has a plan.” And you want to scream. Not because they’re wrong — maybe they’re not — but because none of it touches the thing that is actually happening inside you. The thing that feels less like sadness and more like panic. Like the floor has dropped out. Like you’ve been lied to your whole life and are only just now finding out.

C.S. Lewis — the man who wrote the most famous defense of God’s goodness in the face of suffering (The Problem of Pain, 1940) — found himself standing at that graveside in 1960. His wife, Joy Davidman, was dead. Bone cancer. And suddenly all those elegant arguments about suffering as God’s megaphone felt like “a house of cards.” So he did what writers do. He grabbed four notebooks and started writing. What came out was not a theological treatise. It was a howl.

A Grief Observed is that howl. Published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk — because even Lewis knew this one was too raw for his name — it remains one of the most brutally honest documents a Christian has ever produced about what happens when the theology you’ve taught others gets tested on your own body.

What It’s About

A Grief Observed is exactly what it says: a real-time journal of grief, written across four notebooks in the weeks and months after Joy Davidman’s death. There is no argument here. No thesis statement. No three-point outline. Lewis simply writes what he feels, what he thinks, what he doubts, and what — slowly, painfully, unevenly — he begins to recover.

The book opens with what may be the most famous first line in grief literature: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” From there, Lewis spirals through rage, doubt, accusation, despair, and a creeping suspicion that God might be, in his words, “a cosmic sadist.” He interrogates his own memories of Joy, worries he’s turning her into a false idol, and struggles with the terrifying possibility that everything he believed about God was a comforting lie.

By the fourth notebook, something shifts. Not a triumphant return to faith — nothing so clean. More like a man who has stopped thrashing in deep water and realized he can float. Lewis doesn’t arrive at answers. He arrives at something harder: the willingness to trust without them.

Why This Book Still Matters

We live in a culture that is catastrophically bad at grief. We medicalize it, therapize it, Instagram it, or — worst of all — theologize it into oblivion. Walk into most Christian bookstores and the grief section is wall-to-wall platitudes dressed up in watercolor covers.

A Grief Observed matters because it refuses to do any of that. It is a book written by a man who had every theological tool at his disposal and found that most of them didn’t work — not because they were false, but because grief doesn’t care about your syllogisms. Lewis gave the church permission to say the unsayable: that faith and doubt can exist in the same sentence. That the man who wrote Mere Christianity could write “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”

The 1993 film Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, brought this story to a wider audience. But the film softened the edges. The book doesn’t soften anything.

What It Gets Right

It tells the truth about what grief actually feels like. Lewis nails the phenomenology of loss in a way that no clinical manual ever has. Grief feels like fear. Grief makes you lazy. Grief makes you a bad friend, a bad conversationalist, a bad Christian. He describes the strange embarrassment of grief — how people avoid you, how you become “a death’s head at every feast.” He captures the way grief comes in waves, how you think you’re doing better and then a smell or a turned phrase sends you right back to the bottom. If you’ve lost someone, you’ll read sentences in this book and feel the shock of recognition. That’s what it’s like. Someone finally said it.

It doesn’t flinch from accusing God. This is the part that makes people nervous, and it should. Lewis doesn’t just doubt God’s plan. He doubts God’s character. “What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’?” He calls the divine door “the door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.” He entertains — seriously entertains — the possibility that God is a “Cosmic Sadist.” And here’s why this matters for Reformed readers specifically: Lewis is asking the question that the doctrine of sovereignty demands you eventually face. If God ordains all things, then God ordained this. Lewis looks at Him and says, “Explain yourself.” And the book is honest enough to let the silence hang.

The recovery is messy — and therefore trustworthy. If Lewis had ended with a triumphant return to confident faith, this book would be worthless. Instead, the fourth notebook reads like a man blinking in dim light after being in a dark room. He doesn’t get answers. He gets — and this is the only word for it — presence. He writes: “When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze.” That line is worth the entire book. It’s not a resolution. It’s a relationship.

Where It Falls Short

Theological imprecision in the heat of the moment. Lewis, in several places, uses language that flirts dangerously with open theism. Lines like “Is it rational to believe in a bad God?” are obviously the words of a man in pain, not a man writing systematic theology. Lewis’s actual theology doesn’t go there. But if you hand this book to a young Christian without context, some of those passages could be genuinely destabilizing rather than helpfully honest. The book needs a reader who can distinguish between “Lewis is describing what grief does to your theology” and “Lewis is teaching theology.”

Lewis was not Reformed, and it shows. His soteriology was broad — Anglo-Catholic in many ways. There are moments where you wish he had the doctrines of grace more firmly in hand. His view of Joy’s afterlife is vague and sentimental in places where a robust doctrine of glorification would have given him more to stand on. None of this ruins the book. But Reformed readers will occasionally find themselves saying, “Yes, brother — but also, there’s more here than you’re seeing.”

Who Should Read This

The Bottom Line

A Grief Observed is not a book about answers. It’s a book about what happens to a Christian when the answers stop working. And that makes it one of the most important books a believer can read — not because it will strengthen your theology, but because it will prepare your soul for the day your theology gets tested by a phone call, a diagnosis, or an empty chair at the dinner table.

Lewis wrote The Problem of Pain as a professor. He wrote A Grief Observed as a husband. The difference is everything. The first book will give you a framework. The second book will give you a companion. And when the worst day of your life comes — and it will — you won’t need a framework. You’ll need someone who’s been there.

Is it perfect theology? No. Lewis sometimes wobbles where a firmer Reformed foundation would have held. But perfection is not what this book is for. This book is for the 3 a.m. moment when you can’t pray and you can’t sleep and you’re not sure God is good. And for that moment, there is almost nothing better in print.

Rating: 4/5

Related reading: Tumbler Ridge: Where Is God When Children Die? | Suffering Psalms: A Free 7-Day Reading Plan

As an Amazon Associate, Savage Mercies earns from qualifying purchases.