Blogging the Pain: Grief in the Time of the Internet

Abstract

During the last few decades, grief narratives have become increasingly popular. Especially women, who traditionally take over the responsibilities of a caretaker, have used this narrative genre to express and deal with their losses and to share their experience of grief with a larger audience. With the advance of the Internet, grief blogs have started to complement printed grief narratives, offering a virtual version of the traditional genre of grief writing. This article compares these two versions of grief writing. Drawing on narrative theory, the essay reveals that virtual grief narratives do not merely offer a screen version of a printed text. Rather, blogs produce a new form of grief writing, which decisively differs from its printed counterpart despite many thematic similarities. A text, the essay suggests, is thus defined as much by the act of writing, editing, and publishing as by traditional narrative categories such as topic, voice, and perspective. A comparison of printed grief narratives and grief blogs consequently not only documents a reinvention of grief writing on the Internet, but it also reveals a web-based redefinition of (auto)biographical writing in general.