Windows: A Grief Memoir

The first window in this book belonged to a house Petra Hallway lived in for three years in her twenties. She describes it in eight pages. The house is gone. The window, she notes in a footnote, has been bricked over.

This is not a book about loss in the way that phrase is usually meant. It is a book about apertures — the specific quality of light that enters through a particular opening at a particular time of day — and what it means that buildings change and we do not change with them, or we do change with them, but not in ways we chose.

Hallway is an architect who stopped practicing architecture in 2009. She has not explained why in public. The book does not explain it either, though several of the windows suggest an answer.

The forty-third window is the one she is looking out of now. She does not describe the view. She describes the frame.