Here is a test I would put to anyone who finds the parasocial grief coverage embarrassing: would you say the same thing if the person who died were a friend of yours? Most people would not, and that inconsistency is the entire problem with the discourse. Grief does not check your credentials first. If you sang along to nine and a half million people, you are allowed to be sad about her.
Meg Mason on Nancy Mitford, a lonely teenager, and the strangest thing to happen to this entire field this year.
I want to note this without making it about me, which is difficult, so I will make it about the fact that a bestselling novelist went on record saying a book family saved her life and then got asked about it by The Guardian and answered properly. For thirty years this field has argued about whether these relationships count. It turns out one of them was load-bearing for a person who then wrote a novel about it. Company Dreamer is on the shelf of this site for the same reason. The evidence is the writing.
A widely-shared explainer on why every single person has a parasocial relationship and why most of them are fine.
If you have clicked this far without knowing what the site is about, this is the article. Here is the whole thing: you feel like you know someone who has never heard of you. You know their routine. They do not know you exist. That is the entire phenomenon, it has been studied since 1956, and approximately everyone you know has at least one and thinks they are the only one. So come in, pick a section, and stop being embarrassed about it.
The Guardian ran this on the exact week Dolly Parton, Gloria Steinem and Liam Payne died. The timing is not the story. The timing proves the story.
I want to push back on the word distress in every piece that runs this week, because it is doing too much work. Losing somebody is what happens when the people you love die. If a stadium full of people are grieving Dolly Parton, that is not a malfunction, that is a very large number of people finding out that they loved her. The only unusual thing about parasocial grief is that the person could not have known you were there. That is worth being careful with. It is not worth being condescending about.
The pivot from a death to a discourse about ourselves, in about a day, in front of a diaspora that had to watch it happen.
A person died and the discussion moved to the conduct of the people who were sad about her, which is a way of making the loss about us again. Grief needs witnesses and the argument made sure there were none left standing. All The Horrible Things exists for exactly this hour: media we loved that did something unforgivable, kept anyway, because keeping it is part of how you get through it. There is no tidy version of this and there should not be one.
