A memoir centered on the death of the author's husband forms a study on the joys and frustrations of their marriage, the passage of time, and how life and imagination influence each other.
How could so much consciousness be packed into such a small object? ... It’s like one of those remote places populated by landrace flora and fauna that exist nowhere else on earth ... In a book about death, it’s not surprising that Davis is fixated on metamorphoses and thresholds. She trains her focus on 'ghost-moments': the instant a person steps off the edge of a cliff before she hits the ground, or the split second between opening a door and entering a room ... Traditionally a memoirist’s task is to gather the flukes of her life and marshal them into something resembling a story. But Davis has a different project in mind. She has written a memoir that mimics the atemporal quality of the episodes that give meaning to life ... an entrancing song.
... [an] exquisite, lightning-bolt bright, zigzagging, and striking musing on the self, life, death, and the endlessly provocative jumble of the sublime and the absurd, the comic and the tragic.
... profound ... brief yet stunning ... An attentive reader and erudite writer, Davis plumbs her internal archive in search of solace and clarity in the face of ineffable tragedy ... Her husband’s memory thrums throughout the memoir, somehow both a presence and an absence. The prose is equally undefinable, caught between poetic and concrete ... Digressions about Virginia Woolf and Flaubert, the TV show Lost, and Beethoven’s bagatelles all miraculously align ... These disparate moments transform the memoir into something that flows more like a guided dream, rendered in daring, vulnerable prose, steeped in death but brilliantly transformative ... A transcendent work of literary divination.
