Davis opens her haunting memoir with “Time Passes,” and as this homage to Woolf’s To the Lighthouse reflects, her book is at once a meditation on art, an exploration of a marriage, and an effort to shore up the slippery banks of memory. Written with the clarity and force of a lucid dream, these myriad short chapters land variously in Brigadoon, the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the Buddhist Bardo, Beethoven, camping trips, high school, and more, before each returns Davis—perhaps fortified by the excursion to a past self, perhaps not—to the central trauma of her recent widowhood. But whether delving into key moments that shaped her or examining the shock of new loss, Davis writes in sharp, often breathtaking prose that pushes the boundaries of understanding —a stranger’s  voice “registered not on my ears but on my frontal lobe,” a ghost stands “in a pillar of light you saw without your eyes the same way I heard the lake without my ears”—and packs a visceral punch:  “there is the moment you step off the edge of the cliff before you hit the ground….this moment can last a second or it can last a lifetime”