The Best Memoirs of 2016

Graphic memoirist Tom Hart and his wife lost their daughter, Rosalie, when she was just shy of her second birthday. Nothing had prepared them—not that anything ever could have—for the morning their bubbly, exuberant Rosalie simply wouldn't wake up in her crib. In haunting black-and-white panels, sometimes with all-black backgrounds, Hart depicts the staggering grief that he and his wife, Leela, cycled through: Disbelief, nagging questions (Did Rosalie know she was leaving? Was the sudden thunderstorm that night some kind of portent?), absentmindedness ("I forget how to make coffee," says Tom) and raw pain. "My heart is a blast site," his wife says. The power of this book comes from Tom and Leela's unfiltered honesty, as well as their gradual willingness to allow the light to trickle back in through the broken places. By far one of the most moving books of 2016.