Instead of a Letter Book

Sometimes people can get past a terrible loss; sometimes it cracks something at the centre of who you are. What destroys one person may leave hardly a psychic bruise on another. The nature of Diana Athill's loss may not strike you as worth the sadness it caused her for so long (though it made perfect sense to me), but such judgements are shallow and pointless. The fact is, her loss did strike hard at the core of her sense of who she was in the world, and it and its consequences caused her real damage that she spent the rest of her twenties and thirties rebuilding from. This is a beautiful memoir, a moving exploration of sadness, and surprisingly clear-eyed and unsentimental. When she thinks her younger self was self-indulgent or lazy or weak, she says so. But she also acknowledges the truth of what she felt, and she never underestimates the corrosive power of sadness, loss, loneliness, and regret.