Kaia Gerber Shares Joan Didion Passage on Grief

Kaia Gerber shared a passage from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking about grief after the death of her brother, Presley Gerber. Her Instagram post included the line that grief “comes in waves,” alongside other reflections on loss and books that had helped her.

The passage describes grief as an experience that can arrive unexpectedly and disrupt everyday life. Gerber, a model and actress, posted it as she mourns her brother. The excerpt was drawn from Didion’s 2005 book, which recounts the author’s grief after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died, while her daughter was experiencing serious health problems.

A separate slide in Gerber’s post listed books about grief that she had found helpful, according to one account. Another account reproduced portions of a longer tribute in which Gerber remembered Presley as her “ultimate teacher” and described the difficulty of living with his absence. Those statements were part of her social-media post.

Presley Gerber died at age 27 on September 20 at a rehabilitation facility in Santa Monica, California, according to one report. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner had not determined his cause and manner of death, that report...