Poignant, funny, literary. Hypnotic says the jacket, I read it in one sitting under the spell of the writing, the story, the fairy tales, dogs, music, and literature references. And then I turned to the front to start it again. Not linear but realistic in the snippets of unexpected flashes that accompany grieving and memory. ( )

Such an unapologetic and original little memoir. ( )

I am occasionally reminded that pretention and breathtaking intellect are not irretrievably bonded, that they can exist wholly independently. Kathryn Davis has provided me with a beautiful, graceful, moving proof of that fact.

This very brief memoir in essays about the woman she is and her relationship with her late husband, Eric Zencey who taught and wrote about economics, philosophy and climate change. Though it is clear that Zencey was a brilliant, loving, and supportive mate, parent, and academic this book is not about him other than in relation to Davis and their daughter. The focus here is on Davis herself, She shares her illusions about who she was going to be back when she was a student traveling by ship to her European study-abroad on the ship Aurelia, from which the book gets its title, and about the way things actually unfolded. It is about her growth traveling alongside this man (and earlier, briefly, as a single woman and with her starter husband.) It is also about our place on this planet (Davis and Zencey are/were passionate advocates for the planet, and she says of Zencey that he considered the entire planet to be his personal home.) It is about rage and beauty -- she is very knowledgeable about music and talks a lot about Beethoven, about how his experience of and feelings about deafness found their way into his spectacular later work. The work is unfiltered, but not in the cringey sense, rather in a radically honest and vulnerable way that is instructive and truly moving. Also, the writing is transcendent. This is prose, but in the nature of poetry there are no wasted words, no clunky dumbed-down transitions. Davis trusts the reader to move with her, to fill in some pivots, and I was never lost, I knew where I needed to go and loved the process of melding with her and trusting her guidance. This requires careful reading and that care and time is rewarded tenfold.

This is the second book this year that I have read that made me double down on why Dirtbag Massachusetts was a bad book. After reading this I think I see what Isaac Fitzgerald was trying to do in that book and how he failed. After reading that book I had issues with the form, and those issues are now gone. Used correctly this form, a memoir in moments of decision, of quiet passion, pain and joy succeeds like nobody's business. Now I need to edit my Top 10 nonfiction books of the year list.

One additional note -- the number of books in my tops of the year from Graywolf Press (Danez Smith, Percival Everett, Kathryn Davis and more) is pretty amazing. I think I need to just start reading whatever they publish. ( )