I found this on the street in Brooklyn a few years ago and thought it was about bereavement. It’s not. It’s about losses of all kinds, from Oedipal triangles to death.

I enjoyed it, though parts seem dated (it was written in the Reagan era.) Viorst’s women are long-suffering, passive creatures, who put up with disregard and infidelity from their men. I wonder what she makes of my generation, where the women keep demanding more than the baffled, gentle sons of feminism can give?