The Nature and Effects of Grief

This is the book's central issue, the focus of, and reason for, the author's introspection, narrative commentary, and exploration of memory. As discussed in "Important People—The Author", the issue is explored from both the archetypal and personal perspectives—the author searches some of what has been written before about grief (a universal human experience) for insight into what is happening to her now (a uniquely personal and profound loss). As she chronicles this search, she also chronicles, through intense, stream-of-consciousness narrative, her own experiences with surging emotion, sudden flashes of memory, and unexpected juxtapositions between past and present that, in the author's mind, give both meaning to the past and insight into the present. These, the book suggests, are among the most profoundly troubling of the various effects of grief that she experiences.

A manifestation of grief that's never explicitly...