Maggie MacKellar

It feels somehow wrong to call a memoir of death, loss, grief, and mourning beautiful, but MacKellar's prose is lilting, poetic, and heart-wrenchingly haunting. Her descriptions of mourning her husband, whom she lost to suicide after a long bout of mental illness, and her descriptions of her mother, whom she lost to cancer, are touching and painful to read. The quest for a more quiet life for her and her two children lead her to the countryside, and the details of how this more quiet life allows her to mourn—with Anne Carson's translation of Sappho's fragments beside her—and also cope are as beautiful as they are straight from the gut.… (mer)