What is so heartbreaking about the Time Traveler’s Wife? It is a striking, well written book with a complex structure. The literal world of the story is a stunning idea—that a man could evaporate in and out of the present to other times in his life. But if, for a moment, we leave our fundamentalist reading behind, isn’t this exactly how life actually is?

In the middle of any given day we drift from the simplest and most profound moments of the present into the blinding past. A smell can send us to another world and we actually feel we have lived it again. Language and imagination give us those few glimpses of our future lives.

The ghosts of those who have left us never really leave. I still feel like I see my great-grandfather and my old friend Gabe.

I write this not to put Audrey Niffenegger down or to do anything but praise her book.  I merely wish to point out that the reason her book hits home is not for its rare quality, but for its exact and true way of giving us our current lives in a striking new form.

Jim Harrison, the prolific author of such books as Legends of the Fall, is doing the same thing for me these days. I recently read Returning to Earth and am currently toward the end of Dalva. These books are heartbreaking for the truth they capture. They make and remake the world with a kind of writing that doesn’t announce its elegance.

Read these books. Find out something about your own life that you always suspected might be true. In these talented hands your life will vanish—and reappear—before your eyes.