Take our Depression Test

Find a therapist to heal from grief

Hamnet exquisitely traces how each private sorrow moves through a family.

This is what great art does, it metabolizes sorrow.

In therapy, we try to do something similar, we help grieving clients externalize what has been sealed inside.

Like many readers, I first encountered Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, a time when illness and mortality felt ever-present. The novel draws on a handful of historical facts: Shakespeare and his wife Agnes (also known as Anne Hathaway) had three children; in 1596, their 11-year-old son Hamnet died, likely of the plague. A few years later, Hamlet appeared on the London stage. In that era, the names Hamlet and Hamnet were used interchangeably. O’Farrell imagines what feels psychologically inevitable: that one of the greatest works ever written about grief was born from a father’s own.

What the novel does so exquisitely is trace how each private sorrow moves through a family — reshaping marriage, identity, and meaning. It asks a question therapists know well: What happens to love in the face of unimaginable loss?

When I learned that Hamnet had been adapted for film, directed by Chloé Zhao, I was both hopeful and skeptical. The novel is ethereal,........

© Psychology Today