SOURCE: Womack, Kenneth. “‘My Name Was Salmon, Like the Fish’: Understanding Death, Grief, and Redemption in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism 193, edited by Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter, Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2004.

In the following essay, specially commissioned for Contemporary Literary Criticism, Womack uses the framework of family systems theory to examine acts of narrative therapy and the grieving process presented in The Lovely Bones.

As with so many other works of contemporary fiction and film, Alice Sebold's bestselling novel The Lovely Bones (2002) fulfills our fundamental and indelibly human desires for establishing vital interconnections with the lost friends and loved ones who adorn our personal pasts. Their deaths leave unspeakable voids in our lives that the progress of time and the erosion of memory render ever more vexing and inconsolable with each passing day. Time and time again, the most cherished works...