A review by cais
Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir by Kathryn Davis

5.0

Davis always surprises me with her originality, with how she plays with time & expectations for storytelling. Pivoting around her husband’s death, this very slender memoir moves through transitional moments, fragments of her life which seem so disparate, but are threaded together gracefully. She quotes extensively from other authors, weaving their words into her story so skillfully that it never feels like filler. This is an unsentimental, but no less moving meditation on death, grief, the strangeness of memory, how literature embeds itself in our psyches & the astonishing brevity of life. This writing transcends something & it is beautiful.

"That's all you get," my husband cautioned on his deathbed. "The ripple is what we live on, and we get to pull up one ripple of the water the way cars create a vacuum as they race around a track like clamshells. That's all you get, a ripple, a little bitty thing, a wave, because the world is so huge, you just get to use it for a little while."