The disappearance

A book of letters to a friend, in which Jurgenson discusses different aspects of her bereavement after her two young daughters are killed in a car accident, "The Disappearance" combines raw honesty with the solidly balanced craft of the French epistolary novel. An elegiac, lyrical memoir about living when your children live no more. What do you do, how do you live, when your two precious daughters are killed, their lives ended by a drunk driver at just four & seven years of age? How do you stay in a world from which they've been removed? How do you cope when you turn to them, & they are not there? Genevieve Jurgensen lost her two daughters a dozen years before she began this clear, precise, breathtaking book in an attempt to answer these questions to herself, to her friends, to the world. The outcome is a heart-stopping, powerful testament, in all its anguish surprisingly hopeful. While never forgetting her two daughters & the impact they had on her life, Jurgensen & her husband, Laurent (the moving portrait of their marriage is worth the price of this book alone), go on to have two more children. Told without an ounce of sentiment, The Disappearance will make you miss, for at least a passing moment, two lively little girls you never actually met-& thus have a sense of what it must be like for Jurgensen to miss them every waking hour, every day. It is a story, told brilliantly, of compelling & universal interest.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.