The Untangling Essay Series

(Patrons, scroll down for your free download 🩵)

What happens when the stories we're told about faith, family, and belonging begin to unravel? In this powerful collection of essays, Tiffany Chu charts a course through the aftermath of loss and the journey toward reconstruction. With prose that is both lyrical and precise, she examines the spaces between cultures, between beliefs, between who we were and who we become.

These essays, originally published online, move fearlessly through territory both intimate and universal: a crisis of faith, the complexities of cross-cultural identity, the grief of losing a child, and the challenge of building a home in the aftermath of loss. Yet within these explorations of breaking apart, Tiffany discovers unexpected beauty and connection.

This is a book for anyone who has ever felt caught between worlds, anyone who has loved through loss, anyone searching for home in the spaces between.

Some griefs have names. Others don't.

There are five dates Tiffany Chu carries like stones in her chest. A best friendship that ended not with a fight, but with silence. A mother's apology that came thirty years too late. A faith dismantled by the very church that built it.

And underneath all of it: a son who existed for eighteen years, and then didn't.

The Untangling, Volume 2 is for everyone who has sat in the rubble of something they loved—a person, a belief, a relationship—and had to figure out what to do next. In essays that move from miscarriage to purity culture to the slow death of a grandmother who still asks have you eaten?, Tiffany writes with the kind of unflinching tenderness that makes you feel less alone at 2 a.m.

This is not a book that ties grief into a bow. It is a book that stays in the room with you.

For readers of The Year of Magical Thinking, When Breath Becomes Air, and Crying in H Mart—and for anyone who has ever loved someone they couldn't save.