What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love

A coming-of-age memoir about the ways loss can help us transform us into the people we want to become.

＂I freaking love this book. It’s about so many things, but mostly love and loss, and how you can’t let fear keep you from experiencing all the love--and pain and joy--in this glorious, heart-breaking, unpredictable world.＂ --Jeannette Walls, New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle, The Silver Star, and Half Broke Horses

＂What Looks Like Bravery is a gorgeous, tender, and beautiful book. I’m in tears with the happy-sad truth and beauty of it. Laurel is a magnificent writer.＂--Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild

Laurel Braitman spent her childhood learning from her dad how to out-fish grown men, keep bees, and fix carburetors. Diagnosed young with terminal cancer, he raced against the clock to leave her the skills she’d need to survive without him. This was one legacy. Another was relentless perfectionism and the belief that bravery meant never acknowledging your own fear.

By her mid-thirties Laurel is a bestselling author and a professor at Stanford, but emotionally, and in her personal life, she’s a ship about to splinter on the rocks. Having learned the hard way that no achievement or ambition can protect her from pain or remove the guilt and regret her dad’s death leaves her with, she determines to explore her troubled internal wilderness by way of some big exterior ones: traveling through Northern New Mexico, Western Alaska, and her Tinder app. She finds help from a wise birder in the Bering Sea, a few dozen grieving kids, and a succession of smart teachers who convince her that you cannot be brave if you’re not scared. Along the way, she faces a wildfire that threatens everyone and everything she cares about and is forced by life to say another wrenching goodbye long before she wants to. This time she may not be ready, but she’s prepared.

Joy in the wake of loss, she learns, isn’t possible despite the hardest things that happen to us, but because of the meaning we forge from them. Through her stories of loss, Laurel teaches you that these experiences of grief can actually help create space for new love.

Laurel Braitman is the New York Times bestselling author of Animal Madness. She has a PhD from MIT in the history and anthropology of science and is the Director of the Writing and Storytelling Program at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Wired, and a variety of other publications. She lives between rural Alaska and her family’s citrus and avocado ranch in Southern California. She can be reached at LaurelBraitman.com.