The Disappearance: A Primer of Loss

In 1980, a drunk driver collided with French journalist Genevi ve Jurgensen's brother-in-law's car and killed her two young daughters almost instantly. Since then, she has been a principled and able campaigner for road-safety awareness. The Disappearance is a book of letters to a friend, written, or apparently written, over an extended period, in which Jurgensen discusses different aspects of her bereavement--the useless regrets at having let the girls go on that particular outing, the lost hours during which she could have just breathed in their presence, the counting off each year of what her daughters would have been doing and how old they would have been had they lived. It is the nature of grief to repeat itself, and Jurgensen finds ways to acknowledge this without boring her readers. This is a book that deals with pain in a controlled fashion, combining the raw honesty of its American equivalents with the solidly balanced craft of the French epistolary novel.