While reading Jessie Cole’s Staying: A Memoir, I found myself stuck, fish-hooked by one particular sentence. I’d picked it up at my local bookstore knowing it would likely stir something up in me. This sentence held within it something a little bit catastrophic. Catastrophic as in involving a sudden and large-scale alteration in state, as in furiously underlining three lines of page 113 and waiting a while.

And ever so slowly Zoe—the actual person—disappeared from our lives, drifting around in the depths of withered memories until she became an event, instead of a person.