In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love

When you lose your whole world in a moment, where do you turn? Joseph Luzzi found the answer in Dante’s opening of The Divine Comedy: ‘In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.’

One cold November morning, Luzzi, a professor and Dante scholar, was told his pregnant wife Katherine had been in a car accident. She did not survive, but their daughter Isabel did, delivered by emergency Caesarean a mere forty-five minutes before her mother died. In one terrible instant, Luzzi found himself both a widower and a father.

In the aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy, Luzzi turned to the support of his Italian immigrant family but it wasn’t until he turned to Dante’s epic poem – a poem he had devoted his life to studying and teaching – that he found a way to resurrect his life. Following the same structure as Dante’s epic poem, Luzzi is shepherded out of his own ‘dark wood,’ passing through the grief-stricken Inferno, the Purgatory of healing and learning to be a father to Isabel, and ultimately stepping into the Paradise of rediscovered love.

A meditation on the influence of great art and power to give us strength in our darkest moments, ‘In a Dark Wood’ opens the door into the mysteries of Dante’s enduring classic. Beautifully written, poignant and unflinchingly honest, Luzzi’s book is a hybrid of heartrending memoir and meaningful insight into one of the greatest pieces of literature in all history. Drawing us into man’s descent into hell and back, it is Dante’s journey, Luzzi’s and our very own.