Happy things may not cure your sadness for other things, but the understanding could. ‘You Lost Me There’ by Rosecrans Baldwin is such a book of grief and memory. When you no longer own what you ever own, how do you deal with that? The book review by Michael Schaub is much sensuous:
Memory is the one mercy that grief offers us. Anyone who has lost a loved one can describe the sudden rush of memories that instantly start playing back in rapid-fire succession, just seconds after the realization that there is a person — was a person — who is never coming back. It’s both succor and torture, and it seems to last forever.
Memory is unreliable, of course, and can be treacherous, but it’s still what saves us when we’re mourning. That’s why we read and reread letters and e-mails, even the ones that once seemed insignificant, when we realize that’s all there will ever be.
“I mean, these are lifelines,” says a character in Rosecrans Baldwin’s stunning debut novel of grief and memory, You Lost Me There. “Imagine if words meant that much to you or me, to be a saving grace. I mean, because what’s left afterward, except what we’ve written down?”
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