Would you want a chatbot to help you through grief?

Book Review The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss By Cody Delistraty Harper: $27.99, 208 pages If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. The book revolves around the nearly decadelong grief Delistraty struggled with following his mother’s death from cancer, emotions so all-consuming that his first chapter starts with the question, “Can a Form of Grief Be a Disorder?” Delistraty is a careful and talented writer; he takes seriously his role as the reader’s guide to “a better understanding of where the future of grief and the ways facing it may be headed.” He begins with scientific approaches to the definition of excessive grief, its distinction from depression, and the question of whether it can and should be medically treated. Yet Delistraty is more interested in the wider array of options available to deal with the kind of grief that interrupts one’s long-term well-being, especially how to handle grief as an emotional as well as “bodily experience.” The memoir gives us a range of experiences through his eyes, with a journalistic bent. For Delistraty, since work expectations around grieving are not set to change anytime soon — he notes the average U.S. bereavement leave is three to four days — AI technology could be considered “the best way forward.” Yet perhaps Delistraty’s goal of guiding the reader in all the possibilities of dealing with grief has overridden any judgment on the actual need or effectiveness of AI tech, or the fact that it is ultimately a finite and limited resource. Despite briefly mentioning the 2004 film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which depicted the deleterious effects of deleting painful memories on personal growth, it isn’t until a scientist tells him that such interventions do not address the fundamental problems underlying intractable grief that Delistraty concedes that even if possible, memory deletion may not be the best idea.