Otherwise, I'm Fine: A Memoir

When her husband Bill died in 1969, Tina Presnell gathered her three children. "We won't talk about this," she said. "It will be easier that way." Thus began, in the Presnell family, a decades-long period of silence and intense, isolated grieving for this ordinary man.

In 2012, several years after her mother's death, Barbara Presnell recovered her father's World War II belongings: a scrapbook, news clippings, documents, a...