Grief, of course, is visceral, shocking, literally unspeakable, but in the moment of its enunciation it becomes cultural, a creation, a crafted tale, as Natalie Zemon Davis reminds us in a different context, something subject over time to the tricks of memory, forgetting, retelling, and refashioning. Living with the Aftermath explores these complex processes through the memories of war widows, highlighting the pain of families disrupted by war, the courage of those living with the consequences, and how widows and families worked to make sense out of the senseless.

Memory erases the fragile boundaries that historians struggle to erect between past and present, and this has rarely been clearer than in these tales of war widows. Leafing through this book, we glimpse photos of eager young couples, emblematic of everyday aspirations and hopes, ordinary people, anticipation in their eyes, lives to look forward to. But between the covers these images are rendered tragic – hopes shattered, lives disrupted, dreams dissolved – and yet somehow the women have survived, made lives, lived to tell their tale.

These are remarkable stories, all the more so for their everyday quality. These are ordinary people transformed by national history and working hard to reconcile what happened with what they had hoped might happen. The disjuncture between the two is often painful, and the way these women have lived with the aftermath is complex, poignant, and often inspiring. Their lives sit outside the national story. Although they often internalised their husband’s sacrifices, in public ceremonies we have not given them the space they deserve, something they feel most keenly.

Joy Damousi has uncovered a rich lode of material with which to explore elusive but fundamentally important historical and social problems. For my mind, however, she does both too much and too little with these memories. On the one hand, there is a relentless, historiographical drive in this text. Every possible connection to a debate is cited, although historians who have ventured into this territory before are ticked off for not going far enough (although the precise nature of their failings is never really clear). Equally, much of the evidence is ground through the mill of contemporary psychology and grieving theory. The book charts the historical emergence of the demand to speak about feelings and emotions, but at the same time suggests that the failure to emote, the retreat to silence in the postwar years, more common for widows after World War II and Korea than later wars, was somehow unhealthy.

A contrast is drawn between the postwar insistence that families suffer in silence and more recent demands to express emotion and undergo counselling, evident after such episodes as Granville and Port Arthur. But the contrast does not hold. It fails to see that the silence of widows was not just cultural pathology and reticence but a consequence of their experiences being drowned in a larger national narrative of victory. The postwar years were not ones that sanctioned counternarratives. Granville and Port Arthur did not have to compete with a larger national story, allowing grief to find a recognisable place in these tragic events. Was anything but silence really possible in the 1950s? Is our emotional world now as much a consequence of changes in the conduct of war as it is the growth of therapeutic professions? Even more importantly, there seems little awareness here of the place of counselling in a larger history of knowledge, power, and technologies of confession. These disciplines demand that one speak but only accept particular tales, and then they scrutinise, assess, classify and treat. They may ease a burden, but they also render spoken what is beyond speech, allowing new forms of government of the private.

On the other hand, Living with the Aftermath canvasses an enormous range of issues and arguments. It covers such things as the emotional responses of families, the effects of trauma and grief on wives and children, patterns of divorce, the rise of marriage guidance counselling, and social policy provisions for widows. It moves easily and confidently from intimate insights into the private realm of marital relations to larger questions of public remembrance. It is hard to do justice to the range and quality of Damousi’s insights on all manner of problems and questions. But Living with the Aftermath skips from one insight to the next with amazing rapidity. It rarely pauses to linger over an issue, probe its underbelly, and glimpse its supplement or its complex and contradictory meanings and implications. The same problem afflicted The Labour of Loss, Damousi’s other account of war grief. And although the books differ in focus and emphasis, there is considerable overlap between the two. Perhaps the lack of ‘thick description’ here is a consequence of writing two short books instead of a single substantial one. Whatever the reason, Damousi has not given her important insights and arguments enough air to breathe, grow, and prosper.

This book really comes into its own when the voices of these widows speak to us directly. Of course, this impression of speaking to us is a trick, something magical conjured up by Damousi’s craft. She has created meaningful spaces in which war widows can recount their lives. In doing so, she has added immeasurably to our understanding of war and its consequences. After this, it will be difficult for social and cultural historians of war to ignore war widows and their families. This is a contribution for which we should feel very grateful.