The Lingering of Loss

My best friend left her laptop to me in her will. Twenty years later, I turned it on and began my inquest.

Jill Lepore's friend Jane

tacked to her corkboard a passage from Edith Wharton’s “Backward Glance”: “In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.” But that, Jane, that is crap.

In Jill's opinion.

New Yorker