The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Joan Didion wrote this in the year after her husband died at the dinner table, while their daughter lay in a coma. It won the National Book Award because it describes grief precisely instead of consoling anyone: the way you keep his shoes because he will need them, the way the mind bargains with facts. People in the first months of a loss recognize themselves on every page.

It is the right book for a reader, not for everyone. Give it to the friend or sister who processes things through books, the coworker who mentioned a parent, the wife of a friend who lost someone this year. It says that what they are feeling has a shape and someone famous has felt it.

This is the Vintage paperback, about 230 pages, slim enough to mail in an envelope with a note. Cheaper than flowers and still on the shelf a decade later.