How to Lose Everything: A Memoir

Enduring a series of devastating losses, Christa Couture shares her experiences in navigating grief and ultimately finding a way forward.

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 mourning and then the thyroidectomy that threatened her career as a professional musician, Christa Couture's How to Lose Everything delves into the heart of loss.

Couture has come to know every corner of grief--its shifting blurry edges, its traps, its pulse of love at the center and the bittersweet truth that sorrow is a powerful and wise emotion. 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.

Christa Couture is an award-winning performing and recording artist, non-fiction writer and broadcaster. She is also proudly Indigenous, queer, disabled and a mom. Her sixth recording, Safe Harbour, was released March 2020. Her writing has been published in Room, Shameless and Augur magazines and cbc.ca. As a speaker and storyteller, she has addressed audiences for The Walrus Talks, CBC's DNTO, Moses Znaimer's ideaCity and Imaginate in Port Hope, ON. She is a frequent contributor to CBC Radio's Now or Never and The Next Chapter, and she is a weekday afternoon host on 106.5 ELMNT FM in Toronto, ON.