Grief and the ’90s
August 3rd, 2026 | by Anna Nordberg
I wonder what would losing my mother have looked like in the age of screens. A flood of lovely words on social media, friends of friends putting a broken heart on a post
About Anna Nordberg
Anna Nordberg
is an author and journalist whose essays have appeared in Slate magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Before going freelance, she worked for over ten years as a magazine editor at Time Inc and Conde Nast. Before that, she spent a lot of her childhood writing novels with a number 2 pencil on yellow legal pads.
Anna has a B.A. in English from Yale University, where she also wrote a lot of fiction, this time on a computer. In 2015, she started writing a memoir about becoming a mother without her mom, who died when Anna was a teenager. This led to a focus in her writing on mothers and daughters, how loss unfolds throughout a life, and the vulnerability of being a parent with young children. While the memoir never found a home, Anna brought those themes into her first novel, When She Was Ours, which will be published on August 1, 2026.
Anna grew up in New York City and now lives in San Francisco with her husband, son and daughter, and English cocker spaniel, Guinness (who also loves books).