The Mourner's Bestiary

Finished on: 4/21/2026

 

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

 

_____________________ 

 

Caffall had an uncle who kept a photo album full of friends who had died from HIV/AIDS, which he referred to as his “book of the dead.”

 

I think, ultimately, that’s what The Mourner’s Bestiary is too: Caffall’s own book of the dead, a tribute to family—father, grandparents, uncles and aunts—who died from kidney disease, a tribute and meditation on what they suffered, and a kind of reckoning with everything she herself lost to genetic kidney disease. It’s a memoir about her life with the disease, but in so many ways it feels like a tender eulogy.

 

Caffall’s prose is skillful, peppered with lovely passages, and there’s a confidence to her voice that can only come from a seasoned writer. That said, I found the conceit of the book—the way it continually pairs Caffall’s experiences with phenomena in the natural world—to be a bit forced. About halfway through the book, I found myself almost bracing for the sections that would force a metaphorical meaning from a marine biology fact, or extrapolate on a connection until it felt so stretched it could snap. I’m not conceptually opposed to this kind of structural conceit—I’ve seen this done masterfully in books like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass—but in The Mourner’s Bestiary it at times feels heavy-handed and clumsy rather than organically emerging from the events Caffall describes. I could feel Caffall pulling on the strings, so to speak, which took me out of the book sometimes. That’s why the 3.5 rating rather than a 4 or higher.

 

(Listen, I know all literature is artificial in the original sense of the word: it’s artifice, it’s craft, it’s in no way organic because it must necessarily be formed, structured, refined, etc. etc. It’s just that in my estimation, excellent writing makes you forget that reality—the artifice is so good you can mistake it for something naturally-occurring, y’know? My issue with The Mourner’s Bestiary is that I too often felt the artifice.) 

 

However, this book is definitely worth picking up if you’re interested in literary memoir, or reading firsthand accounts of life with chronic illness. Just prepare for some occasionally heavy-handed scaffolding around the lovelier parts.