In this bestselling memoir, famed journalist-screenwriter Joan Didion grapples with both her husband’s recent death and the life-threatening illness of her only child. Written simply and authentically, it never flinches from her profound sense of loss. It’s a meditation on mourning and grief, which in lesser hands could have been lachrymose or self-pitying, but Didion’s prose and the sharpness of her insight keeps it well above this.

I felt slightly guilty, at about 180 pages in – just 50 pages from the end – wanting to put it down. After that much loss, I was eager to get back to the land of the living. It’s no fault of Didion’s writing. But at a certain point I was in the mood for something shallow and funny. I’ll probably read those last 50 pages, but later.