The Mourner’s Bestiary

A critically-acclaimed literary memoir braiding together environmental research and the personal journey of generational healing, grief, and chronic illness.

＂Caffall brilliantly parallels her family’s suffering with large-scale ecological upheaval, maintaining a flicker of hope for the future in both cases. This deserves a wide readership.＂ Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review

Author Eiren Caffall is the inheritor of a family legacy of two hundred years of genetic kidney disease and the mother of a child who may inherit that legacy.

A literary memoir on loss, chronic illness, and generational healing, Caffall’s The Mourner’s Bestiary is also a meditation on grief and survival told through the stories of animals in two collapsing marine ecosystems--the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound--and the lives of a family facing a life-threatening illness on their shores.

The Gulf of Maine is the world’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem, and the Long Island Sound has been the site of conservation battles that predict the fights ahead for the Gulf.

＂Beguiling, idiosyncratic [...] Caffall writes with plangent intensity about our responsibility toward the planet, and her eye for the wonder and beauty of ocean life pierces the illusion of disconnected existence.＂ ? Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant judges citation

＂Eiren Caffall has produced some of the most powerful writing on the ecological crisis I have read anywhere. Caffall is a gifted writer, and this book is strong medicine.＂ ? Naomi Klein, author, social activist, and filmmaker

Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician based in Chicago, Illinois. Her writing on loss and illness, oceans and extinction has appeared in Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera, Literary Hub, Minding Nature, and The Rumpus. She has been the recipient of a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship in environmental journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and a Frontline: Environmental Reportage residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts. She is the screenwriter for the short film Becoming Ocean. She lives in the Logan Square neighborhood with her husband and son.