Gideon Haigh’s brother Jasper – “Jaz” – was 17 when he was killed in a car accident. Decades later, Haigh picked up a pen and, in a 72 hour span, wrote about the night Jaz died, all that led up to it, and all that he has lived since.
Haigh is a prolific writer. You may know him from his cricket writing, but also his investigative journalism about crime, trauma and the law. Sometimes he writes about all of these things at once.
To borrow a term from writer Anna Jurecic, Haigh is an “essayistic mourner”: someone who draws on his writing ability to investigate his loss. As Jurecic notes, literary grief memoirs “provide vivid evidence that mourning is more complicated than formulaic accounts of bereavement acknowledge”.
