To be honest, I got about halfway before another overdue library book was calling my name more strongly. This one just wasn’t written for me, and by that I mean its thesis and focus was not aligned with what I expected or hoped for. It’s well-composed but I was not equipped to enjoy it.

I picked it up seeking a sort of kinship: a creative mourning the death of her dad. Lately, I’ve needed that sort of internal non-conversation. Someone who does indeed “get it” or the gist of it. What turned me off so acutely was suddenly there was a lot of name-dropping and huge swaths of emails from her dad with sparse nuggets of deep contemplation and reflection in between. There is humor and genuine warmth in the letters between the Carrs—the self-archival work must have been mentally exhausting if not excruciating. But without understanding more of their day to day, many of the letters from father to daughter lose depth... and that’s when it hit me that of course, I was reading this all wrong.

It’s a memoir about losing father David Carr. And I never knew anything about his work or his life. The gravity of losing him, specifically. How his own experiences are a layer of meaning over these other, special notes to his daughter. And a lot of life and other things happen in between these letters (mostly in the form of emails), but stacked up on top of each other in a relatively slim text, for a non-Carr noobie, they lose meaning and impact. Erin has a documentarian’s eye by way of laying out facts and delivering what is happening around a particular moment... but in a memoir I crave the deep and contemplative rumination from the author that forms like sinew between bone and muscle.