My debut memoir How to Lose Everything is out now from Douglas & McIntyre!
Where to buy the book
Synopsis
Book club guide
Reviews, interviews, and press
The music in How to Lose Everything
Where to buy the book
Canada: Find How to Lose Everything at your local independent bookstore (in store and online) or order the book from Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca or directly from Douglas & McInTyre.
In the US, the book is available online or in store from your local bookstore and on Amazon.com.
Internationally, you can order through Book Depository. Also, my favourite local bookshop, Another Story, is happy to fulfill international orders and you can buy from them here.
Info for booksellers at Douglas-Mcintyre.com/pages/ordering.
Also, stream or download all of the music I mention in the book here.
Synopsis
“Christa Couture has come to know every corner of grief—its shifting blurry edges, its traps, its pulse of love at the centre and the bittersweet truth that sorrow is a powerful and wise emotion.
From the amputation of her leg as a cure for bone cancer at a young age to her first child’s single day of life, the heart transplant and subsequent death of her second child, the divorce born of grief and then the thyroidectomy that threatened her career as a professional musician, How to Lose Everything delves into the heart of loss. Couture bears witness to the shift in perspective that comes with loss, and how it can deepen compassion for others, expand understanding, inspire a letting go of little things and plant a deeper feeling for what matters. At the same time, Couture’s writing evokes the joy and lightness that both precede and eventually follow grief, as well as the hope and resilience that grow from connections with others.
Evoking Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Couture explores the emotional and psychological experiences of motherhood, partnership and change. Deftly connecting the dots of sorrow, reprieve and hard-won hope, How to Lose Everything contains the advice Couture is often asked for, as well as the words she wishes she could have heard many years ago. It is also an offering of kinship and understanding for anyone experiencing a loss.”
Reviews, interviews, and press
For podcast interviews, which are a beautifully different beast than media, click here.
REVIEW: The Vancouver Sun
“…deep psychological insight and a compassionate but never sentimental regard for all of us, the flawed human beings who jostle together in this world of loss.”
INTERVIEW: CTV The Social
“It won’t get better, it will be different.” Memoir offers guide for people going through grief.
INTERVIEW: CBC Day 6
“How to Lose Everything: Christa Couture’s memoir about loss, strength, music, hope — and more loss”
REVIEW: Quill & Quire
“By exposing her greatest sources of grief, Couture shows that there is love and healing to be found in memory.”
INTERVIEW: 49th Shelf
“[How to Lose Everything] might be the wisest, most delightful sad story that you’ve ever read in your life.”
REVIEW: The Best BC-Books of 2020
REVIEW: The Best Canadian Non-Fiction of 2020
INTERVIEW: CKCU
“…a remarkable book, and a remarkable conversation.”
INTERVIEW: CBC Unreserved
“Piecing things together”: Christa Couture on how writing about loss helped her move forward.
REVIEW: BookAlong
“A beautiful, profound, and moving memoir…It will break you and put you back together again.”
PREVIEW: 10 Buzzworthy Canadian Authors to Watch
REVIEW: Roots Music Canada
“…Christa’s art, which derives from the depths of despair and hopelessness, is so fantastically undepressing to read or listen to.”
INTERVIEW: Global Morning
“This Toronto woman has experienced more loss than most people do in a lifetime”
INTERVIEW: CTV Your Morning
“Her debut memoir memoir details a life of extraordinary mental, emotional, and physical endurance.”
EXCERPT: thekit.ca
“The day Christa Couture lost her baby.”
INTERVIEW: Reframe Your Life
“…about the questions she gets asked most frequently, her story of loss and the writing process.”
REVIEW AND EXCERPT: Best Health
“Couture knows, perhaps better than any of us, the stories that truly matter — the ones that force us into spaces that may be uncomfortable, but deepen our capacity for compassion, and our understanding of different perspectives.”
The music in How to Lose Everything
My songs are woven throughout my memoir How to Lose Everything — their lyrics, their origins, their connection to my life experiences. You can stream or download the songs mentioned in the book here: