Looking at my bookshelf, which is currently filled with Australian novels and short story collections, there are very few stories that do not explore grief and loss in some way. There are the overt explorations of grief: Virginia Lloyd and Carol Lefevre, Felicity Volk and Tim Winton. Then there are the more abstract explorations that challenge the conventional concepts of both grief and loss, seen in the work of writers like Debra Adelaide, Cate Kennedy, Richard Flanagan and Melissa Lucashenko.

When I was younger, I had a very rigid idea of what constituted loss, with what constituted grieving. An idea that was informed by the funerals I went to, the stories I heard, the things I watched and the books I read.