Elegy and history are cousins

 
Elegy and history are cousins, she explains, because they’re both forms of autopsy.

Lamentation 

Anne Carson, NOX

 
 I began a letter, as if to a dead friend, or perhaps the preliminary notes for a novel.
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He will have out his notebook; under D, he will enter “Phrases to be used on the deaths of friends.”
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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend.

Actual Thrills
Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd | Virginia Woolf, The Waves | Annie Dillard, The Writing Life