the book is an homage in celebration of weingarten's brilliant literary sister, kathryn washburn.the author calls it a collage of memories, dream fragments, imagined encounters and reflections on girlhood. not memoirs but poetic fiction. and her costa thank with her sister, mary weingarten does not in gauges and the philosophical questions of the day as tennyson does in memorial him. she does not tell us it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. what she does is to circle endlessly around her grief, seeing it from all sorts of angles but never escaping it. her book is heartbreaking because it rings as to precisely the point of what a book cannot do to make her sister be again. and yet, and yet her book also does precisely what a book can do, bring her brilliant talented sister before us and all her living glory. in the deep vividness suffer endlessly problematical absence, in mary weingarten's hands kathryn washburn turns out to be the most marvelous pains they can be imagined. a little bit about mary weingarten. mary weingarten grew up outside of washin