The memoir I recommend most reluctantly but most consistently is When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. I say reluctantly because it is a book about dying, written by a neurosurgeon who was dying of lung cancer, and it does not offer a resolution or a consolation. It ends the way his life ended, midsentence.

What it does offer is clarity. Kalanithi was a person who had spent his life thinking about what makes a life worth living — first as a student of literature, then as a physician who worked with the brain itself as a medium of personhood. The memoir is the synthesis of both inquiries, conducted under the pressure of imminent death.

I give it to people who are facing serious illness, their own or someone else's. I also give it to people who aren't. The question it asks — what do you want to have been? — is not only relevant in extremity.