Closing the Book: Travels in Life, Loss, and Literature

Joelle Renstrom's "Closing the Book: Travels in Life, Loss, and Literature" explores the intersection of literature and life in personal essays about traveling, teaching, reading, writing, living, and dying. Each essay's narrative arc is formed and informed by the act of reading literature that makes a reader feel like the book she's reading was somehow written specifically for her to read in that exact moment.Renstrom, who moved to New York on September 8, 2001, reads Kurt Vonnegut's "Sirens of Titan" and engages the assertion that "[we are all] victims of a series of accidents," in an attempt to make sense of the roles of luck, fate, and karma in the events of 9/11, as well as the aftermath in her own life and in the lives around her. Renstrom uses Don DeLillo's "White Noise" as a vehicle for contemplating mortality as she struggles with her father's cancer diagnosis, her unexpected return to her hometown, and the fear of death that envelops her family's entire existence. Later, as the author travels to Sweden with her father's ashes, searching for some sign of him, his ancestors, or of her true but lost self, she writes a series of letters to Ray Bradbury, whose work she reads along the way. Renstrom relies on science fiction as a catalyst for grief, as well as a means of pushing past grim realities to begin envisioning life reconstructed and to embrace the idea that "there's nothing wrong with rebuilding forever."