Het literaire werk van deze auteur duikt in de psychologische en sociale facetten van de menselijke ervaring, waarbij regelmatig thema's als trauma en veerkracht worden verkend. Haar onderzoeksachtergrond, met name bij kwetsbare bevolkingsgroepen, vormt haar genuanceerde benadering van karakterontwikkeling en vertelling. Ze brengt academische strengheid in haar verhalen, waarbij ze de complexiteit van de menselijke psyche met gevoeligheid en inzicht onderzoekt.
The author anticipated building an ordinary family. And that's what happened. But mental illness and grief also happened, undermining the security of home and changing the familial experience from ordinary to extraordinary. A hard story to live, a hard story to read, this book
Donna McCart Sharkey and Arleen Paré, sisters and writers, have co-edited an anthology Don’t Tell: Family Secrets, about what may be hidden in families. For each individual, even in the same family, what is secret and what is not, may be different. In Don’t Tell: Family Secrets, fifty-nine writers tell their stories in either prose or poetry, of their own family secrets. So often, mothers bear the burden, stand over time as the keepers of these secrets, trying to keep families intact. Spanning continents, cultures, wars, belief systems, and the private lives of families, the secrets in this book range from over one hundred years ago to the present and include stories—some serious, others quirky, some resolved, and still others that remain a mystery.
When her daughter died in November, 2013, she was a parent in search of consolation and looking for similarities to her situation. She began to read the obituary column of her local newspaper and although the author of A Death in the Stories Obits Tell read extensively about death of an adult child, she found obituaries the most comforting and kept returning to them. Day after day, she became obsessed and discovered that obituaries were a specific genre in themselves. This book, written within the tradition of social history, follows a decade of obituaries from the point of view of one author and notices the gradual changes in content, context, and style. In clear and precise writing, Donna McCart Sharkey explores and finds the extraordinary within the captivating life stories – the brief biographies and at times, autobiographies – of the newly dead.