"Jeff Porter has given us an incredibly warm, rich, vivid memoir, a love letter to his deceased wife and an autobiography of love attained and lost. When a person dies a world passes away, yet Porter has created a cabinet of wonders out of a thousand bits of the world that vanished when his wife died. The sentences are sharp and surprising, perfectly formed, by turns painful, funny, haunting, and inevitably right."

"An inherently absorbing, thoughtful and thought-provoking read, Planet Claire: Suite for Cello and Sad-Eyed Lovers is laced with unexpectedly effective blend of humor and heartbreak, love and loss, that is as intimately personal as it is recognizably universal."

"Planet Claire left me awestruck. I don’t know how he did it, but on every page of this incredible book, Jeff Porter manages to convey devastating sadness while also being delightful company. His grief does double duty as an almost otherworldly sort of introspection, pulling the reader into a continuum in which time, space, love, loss, art, and nature constantly play off one another until they become one another. This is not just the best grief memoir I’ve read in years, it’s one the best memoirs, period"

"In elegiac prose, the bereft Porter grieves by reminiscing about the life [he and Claire] shared together . . . Porter’s memoir is a wistful, often painful, but beautifully written account of the trauma of grief, and also embodies the way writing provides solace from the bleak absurdities of life."

"Through his turmoil and grief, readers are plunged into 274 pages of Porter’s past and present, and through space as he navigates what he calls ‘Planet Claire.’ The piece beautifully describes what his life with her was like and what it will be like with her not there."

"The pleasure is in the circling intelligence of the memoirist, each gyre bringing us closer to this very specific, endearing individual's life experience and his love for Claire. Paradoxical as it sounds, this book about death and grief is charming, humorous, poignant, and vital."
—Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and to Tell

"Planet Claire left me awestruck. I don't know how he did it, but on every page of this incredible book, Jeff Porter manages to convey devastating sadness while also being delightful company. His grief does double duty as an almost otherworldly sort of introspection, pulling the reader into a continuum in which time, space, love, loss, art, and nature constantly play off one another until they become one another. This is not just the best grief memoir I've read in years, it's one the best memoirs, period."
—Meghan Daum, author of The Problem with Everything

★ 2020-11-05
An English professor employs his devotion to language to plumb the depths of unimaginable grief.

Porter bravely recounts the circumstances surrounding the untimely death of his wife, Claire, a “meticulous scholar” herself. In excruciatingly moving detail, the author describes how, after 27 years of marriage, his wife collapsed on an otherwise normal Wednesday, the victim of an aneurysm. “Young and resilient, the needle on her life span hardly past midway, Claire died abruptly, as though I had been absentminded or had left the gas stove on or the door open,” writes Porter. “I looked up from the morning paper and she was gone.” Throughout, the author looks directly at grief, without avoidance or rationalization, chronicling the countless memorable aspects of his gut-wrenching experience, from the warmth of Claire’s skin in the hospital to those who gratefully received his wife’s organ donations. Porter is erudite and lyrical—characteristics about which Claire playfully teased him ("Claire was never fooled by eloquence. She was too keen to be tricked by a pretty sentence”)—and he couches his thoughts in something of a memory palace and ruminations on celestial bodies. He also sends his most difficult thoughts out into the void in the form of “Space Boy,” an imagined version of himself that is free to roam the cosmos looking for Claire. It’s to the author’s credit that none of these high-literary elements blunt or mitigate the trauma portrayed here, which is tough to digest, even on the page. Few readers will fail to be gripped by this tragically common story about death and what comes after for those left behind. “Obviously the dead don’t need or want our grief,” writes the author. “They’re busy with other things, have a whole new set of rules. It’s the living—we poor naked wretches—teeming clueless over this planet.”

A haunting and thought-provoking consideration of death and “how utterly it rips apart our lives.