Sonali Deraniyagala's memoir Wave, is in the same family of memoirs as Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking and its sequel, Blue Nights, i.e. it is literature of grief.
Like Didion, Deraniyagala writes to make sense of the loss of her family, her husband and two sons and her parents.
Didion's loss came in the quiet of her domestic setting. In Year she likens the sudden slumping forward of her husband face down on the dinner table on a perfectly normal evening, to the un-foreshadowed slamming of American Airlines flight 11 into the walls of the World Trade Center's North Tower 1 at 8:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001. The two things happen on a nondescript day, and come unannounced; hence the severity of the impact on those the events befall.
Deraniyagala's family falls sudden victim to a natural disaster; the Indian Ocean tsunami spawned by the earthquake in 2004 killed them as they were vacationing in a beach hotel in Sri Lanka.
Deraniyagala was the lone survivor as she miraculously clung to the limb of a tree. She writes not only to deal with her loss, but also to reckon with what we know to be the survivor's guilt.
A NYT review describes the book as a "somber volume" that explores the complexity of human grief. Grief, as Julian Barnes writes in Flaubert's Parrot, is a permanent resident in the lives of those who suffer loss. It's not easily got out of like one gets out of a tunnel into the sunshine.
You come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick, [...] You are tarred and feathered for life.
Such an image of grief is palpable in Wave, and it makes me want to post the image of the gull tarnished and stunned by the Beyond Petroleum oil spill along the Gulf Coast a couple of years ago.
Ms Deraniyagala is the gull.
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