A friend gave me a copy of Kevin Brockmeier’s novel The Truth About Celia when I was in Boston in August. I’ve had it sitting in my office ever since. It’s the story of the disappearance of the narrator’s seven-year-old daughter and how he deals with his grief by writing. I’ve avoided the book these past few months because of its subject matter, but I picked it up last night.

Brockmeier writes beautifully. The story opens on the day of Celia’s mysterious disappearance and begins to build inexorably towards the inevitable moment when her father discovers she’s missing. As I read I became more and more aware of the three-year-old and four-year-old girls sleeping a few metres away from where I was reading, and I became less and less able to read. I know I should be able to, but somehow I found it too hard to read a fictionalised account of something that is just too awful to contemplate. I’ll read Brockmeier’s next book, though.