pressingness

Julian Barnes’s 2013 book Levels of Life – which includes a memoir of his loss of his wife to an aggressive form of cancer – describes with unusual candour how the person grieving can feel anger towards friends “for their inability to say or do the right things, for their unwanted pressingness or seeming froideur. And since the grief-struck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don’t, offence-giving and offence-taking are common.”