Why did Greene write this memoir? Who is it for?

There are a number of possible answers to this question, prompting students to reflect on the number of ways that writing the book helped Greene process his grief. One could argue that his intended audience is Greta; he regularly veers into the second person, speaking directly to her, telling her about the days after her death and love for her he feels and witnesses after her accident. One could also make the case that the book is a result of a private exercise of writing-through-grief, that it is essentially a book for Greene himself, one that he felt compelled to write. The preponderance of textual evidence mostly suggests, however, that he wrote the book for a general public unfamiliar with this level of tragedy and loss, which Greene takes pains to vividly describe. The memoir is at...