Davis' darkly imaginative and surreal novels, including The Silk Road (2019) and Duplex (2013), will cue readers to the improbability of her writing a conventional memoir. Instead she presents a series of incisive sketches capturing reverberating moments in her life, including a clearly formative interlude in her Philadelphia childhood, during which her mother read her fairy tales as Davis endured a long bout with pleurisy. Aurelia is the name of the student ship Davis sailed on to Europe, a transformative voyage for a "pretentious girl of sixteen with a prancing intellect and an overweening desire for Romance." Other passages are more daunting, especially the death of her husband and disconcerting episodes in her life as a widow. Davis reflects on memory, the senses, literature (Aurélia is the title of a novella by Gérard de Nerval), and art. In a riveting piece about Beethoven's Bagatelles, Davis considers "the moment between, the ghost-moment," a key motif in this 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.

Novelist Davis (The Silk Road) conjures real and imagined worlds in this lithe and cerebral exploration of life, death, and the ways both influence craft. When her husband died from cancer in 2019 in his 60s, Davis's vision of their future went with him as well. But as she vividly illustrates in nonlinear, dreamlike vignettes, her memories of their past, and her own, remained. Mining them to make meaning of her loss, she delivers a resonant meditation on impermanence that takes the form of ghost stories; musings on the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, whose "genius of conjuring a sense of time" gave young Davis "that shiver of ecstasy that is an unmistakable symptom of the creative act"; an account of a fanciful trip that gets derailed by a blizzard; and a study of Beethoven's Opus 126 that argues transitions--whether they be in music, art, or life itself--deserve the same reverence as their outcomes. Loosely following the trajectory of her marriage to its end, she injects her narration with moments that evoke the infinitude of love: "It's different washing the body after the person has died.... The wish to inflict no harm is still there, elevated by the absence of response to something resembling desire." Bending genre and time, this is a pleasure to get lost in. (Mar.)