A poignant topic being retold in prose, just a couple of years after the entire world seemed to shift on its axis. Though it's only been 2 years since 2020, it was quite a reflective piece that can bring you back to those times instantly.

Overall I thought the subject matter was extremely relevant, there just seemed to be some disconnection with certain chapters vs others, but not overall a bad read.

Learning in February of 2020 that an old girlfriend (it was a brief fling, they were never “in love”, and they knew enough people in common to have kept casually crossing paths over the intervening twenty-eight years) had died of cancer, author Ed O’Loughlin found himself suddenly feeling old and unmoored and casting about for the meaning of it all. When pandemic-related lockdowns then hit and O’Loughlin found himself relegated to an attic boxroom to do his writing (while his wife and daughters did their own writing and schoolwork downstairs), he found himself going back over his life — an unhappy childhood, family loss, years as a foreign correspondent before turning to writing literature, his current happy home — and the result is this memoir. By turns touching and funny, always interesting and contemplative, I most appreciated learning how details from O’Loughlin’s personal life show up in his novels (him having been a journalist in Africa and the Middle East makes so much sense now that I know it), and if nothing else, this makes for a fine record of the 2020 experience in first rate prose. This might appeal most to a niche audience (although I think everyone should be reading this author), and as for me, I loved it.