The writer – and daughter of a high-profile father – says that the tragedy of her mother’s suicide has been the making of her as an Anglican priest

“If I wasn’t a priest,” reflects Marie-Elsa Bragg, “I wouldn’t be publishing this book.” On the table between us as we sit talking in her north London cottage lies Sleeping Letters, a slim volume of little more than 100 pages that explores the suicide of her French mother, Marie-Elisabeth Roche. “It is the priesthood that allows me to give it,” she explains. “Because I am saying, ‘Look, this is possible, and I am in it with you’.”

By revealing her own anguish, she believes, she is sharing something with all those whose lives are framed by loss and mourning. “Grief is something no one talks about. It is universal, and sometimes we are so scared of it. We carry it around with us like a ball and chain because we don’t see that we can go through it, survive it.”

In what is the most striking feature of a book that is part-poetry, part-prose, part-memoir, part-performance and part-spiritual reflection (one fan, the artist and author Edmund de Waal, has likened it to “a kind of dance”), she brings unity to all the different aspects with an account in verse, threaded through the pages, of the ritual of the Eucharist – starting with the altar, the cloth, the candle, the collar box and the robes, building to consecration, and the promise of redemption. To say more would be to spoil it, and this is a book, as one who knows something about grief, that I can unhesitatingly recommend as balm.