The memoir I want to recommend is not a famous one. It's H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, which is about training a goshawk while grieving the death of her father, and it is one of the most technically accomplished books I have read in ten years. The prose is precise in the way that good poetry is precise — each word placed for reasons.

What it does that most grief memoirs don't is triangulate: Macdonald is writing about herself, about the hawk, and about T.H. White's own failed attempt to train a goshawk. Three threads, each illuminating the others. The structure holds the emotional weight in a way that keeps the book from becoming shapeless sadness.

I gave it to my father when my grandmother died. He called me two weeks later and told me it was the first book that had made him cry since he was a child. I'm recommending it here because that seemed like information worth sharing.