In 2022, about 60,000 children in the United States under the age of six lived with a single widowed mother, nearly three times the number of children living with a widowed father. Yet our society still shies away from open discussion about death and its aftermath, normalizing the tragedy and ignoring the pain.

In 1987, Annie Gudger lost her husband when she was six months pregnant with their first child.  THE FIFTH CHAMBER chronicles how loss turns to grief…but also how she found beauty on the other side.

Now, Annie and her daughter, Maria Gibson, also have a podcast - Coffee, Grief, and Gratitude.

THE FIFTH CHAMBER

Annie Gudger

I got it. Annie Gudger uttered those words when she had to do all the hard things, by herself, after her husband – the love of her life – died in an accident when she was six months pregnant with their first child. Now she must navigate the trials of single motherhood, mourning, and learning to love again.  A mantra of sorts to family, friends, co-workers, neighbors…and mostly herself. ‘I got it’ helped her breathe, helped her get from here to there.

Fascinated with the heart and its fifth chamber that holds more love, that holds shadows, Annie poetically chronicles her passage through grief and the beauty she found on the other side in her debut memoir, The Fifth Chamber (On sale: September 9, 2023; Jaded Ibis Press; paperback; ISBN: 9781938841217; $17.99).

In 2022, about 60,000 children in the United States under the age of six lived with a single widowed mother, nearly three times the number of children living with a widowed father. Yet our society still shies away from open discussion about death and its aftermath, normalizing the tragedy and ignoring the pain.

Crafted with lightning bolts of joy and sorrow, The Fifth Chamber is a tender and lyrical memoir about the dance of loss and life, and how grief can make the heart beat stronger than ever before.

Annie and her daughter Maria Gibson have a podcast - Coffee, Grief, and Gratitude.  For Annie, writing about love and loss has been her life’s work, publishing works in The Rumpus, Real Simple, Tupelo Quarterly, Atticus Review, Sweet Lit, Cutthroat, Cutbank, Columbia Journal, and many more.

About the Author

Anne Gudger is an autobiographical essayist who writes hard and loves harder. She’s been published in Real Simple, Cutbank, Cutthroat, The Los Angeles Review, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and the Columbia Journal, among others, and has been a Best of the Net nominee twice. She is also the co-founder of Coffee and Grief, a reading series that’s been thriving since March 2020 and hosts five curated readers every month reading on grief. Anne lives in Banks, Oregon with her beloved husband. The Fifth Chamber is her first book.

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PRAISE FOR ANNE GUDGER AND THE FIFTH CHAMBER

“There’s no one, and I mean no one, who writes like Anne Gudger. A balm to the heart and a hug and an ‘It’s so good, I wish I wrote that’ kind of beautiful.”

—Jennifer Pastiloff, bestselling author of On Being Human

Anne Gudger's The Fifth Chamber is a book with a pulse that will remind you

how the dance of grief and love lives in us all. As she weaves her way through life, death, love and longing, those struggles that threaten to overwhelm us are brought so close to the edge of beauty that they kiss. A shivering triumph. A brilliant heartsong.

- Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust and Chronology of Water.

Anne Gudger's Fifth Chamber is an absolute revelation on every page. Her story of surviving widowhood while six months pregnant with her son takes readers on the jagged path from all-consuming grief to the new life forged from tears, rage, gnashing, and ultimately, acceptance. Readers will cheer Gudger as she claws herself back from the brink of dizzying loss, both for herself and for the young son she delivered just months after burying her husband. When she falls in love again, I felt my own heart burst open with joy watching her and her young son get a second chance at the family she'd thought was gone forever. And best of all, Gudger's language is a singular, pure delight—no one constructs a sentence quite like Gudger, and readers will be transformed when they are plunged into her lyrical prose, which brims with color, light, and raw sensation. 

—Christie Tate, author of NYT bestseller Group and BFF