The death of Roger Rosenblatt’s daughter Amy at age 38 was completely unexpected. She collapsed on the treadmill at home, felled by a heart abnormality that affects less than two thousandths of one percent of the population.

Statistics are of little comfort to Amy’s hard-working surgeon husband, Harris, who was left with three young kids: Jessie, 6, Sammy, 4, and infant James. Rosenblatt and his wife of 46 years, Ginny, decided to lend a hand, moving from Long Island to Bethesda, where they took up residence in their son-in-law’s guest bedroom. Their commitment was real. Roger scaled back his workload considerably; Ginny got back into a matronly rhythm that impressed her friends.

In Making Toast, an understated yet gripping memoir, acclaimed writer Rosenblatt recalls a period of loss, adjustment and memories as they became parents for the second time. Better known as “Boppo” to his grandkids, Rosenblatt doesn’t ask for sympathy or tears. He chronicles his new life as expert toast-maker and guardian/playmate/professor with a mixture of wonder and love.

What makes the book so absorbing is the way Rosenblatt interrupts his short chronicles—the slim book has no chapters—with a thunderbolt observation or statement. Ginny remarks that she feels like she’s now living Amy’s life; Roger initially eschews therapy because “we will never feel right again. No analysis or therapy will change that.” One section consists of the following: “Ginny has a choking fit at breakfast. It lasts only seconds, but Jessie freezes. Sammy runs from the room.”

Rosenblatt puts a life-altering event in simple, clear terms. By employing restraint (which, considering the circumstances, had to be excruciating), he reveals volumes about the power of family without wallowing in sentiment and self-help hooey. The big points come across loud and clear, including the following: A close family may suffer more, as Rosenblatt writes, but that closeness allows everyone to return to doing the simple, necessary things. Like making toast.

Pete Croatto is a freelance writer who lives in New Jersey.

Phyllis Theroux’s captivating new work, The Journal Keeper, is a multi-dimensional pleasure. It brings to mind Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait, in which Rockwell shows us three images of himself: from the back as he works, in the mirror where he is observing his own face and on the canvas where he is rendering an interpretation of his image. Likewise, in The Journal Keeper, Theroux also offers us a multilayered view of herself that is at once whimsical and profound.

She is the writer simply writing, chronicling her life as it is lived, offering her observations, thoughts and reflections: “Yesterday afternoon, the sun shattered a jug of hydrangeas into shards of light on my dining room table. It was there for anyone to look at but I only did so in passing, the way a king glances casually out the carriage window at his kingdom.” She is the spiritually awakened writer, looking back over a lifetime of journal-keeping and realizing “a hand much larger and more knowing” was often guiding her pen across the page. She is the writer writing about writing: “It is like drilling for oil, having the faith that it is down there. But beyond or beneath that faith is the commitment to dig, whether the oil is there or not.” She is the writer/teacher, encouraging others to keep their own personal “ship’s log.”

And because mothers and daughters so often reflect each other, Theroux’s relationship with her aging mother adds yet another dimension to the narrative. On her mother’s 85th birthday, contemplating the loss she must inevitably face, she writes, “She is such a continual gift, when I imagine her gone I cannot quite see myself there.” Theroux’s account tenderly paints a portrait of her remarkable mother in her final years, displaying her own gifts as a caregiver and best friend in the process. But whatever her subject—growing old, spiritual growth, life in a small town, her students and teaching life, even a new romantic passion (at 64! Break out the old Beatles record!)—Theroux is able to reach deep inside and step outside herself with inspiring aplomb.

Linda Stankard lives multi-dimensionally in Rockland County, New York.