Here is one detail about a quirky, blond, 5-year-old girl who died: “She carried hard dried salami in a small pink and white gingham purse.”

Here are others: She wore glasses and glittery red shoes. She carried a leopard-print backpack. She loved making art and listening to the Beatles, and she luxuriated in sleep in a way her gentle big brother, Sam, never could. Two days before she died, she picked purple myrtle and green chives in the backyard and made her mom a bouquet.

A fiction writer knows that such details make a character come alive. But novelist Ann Hood’s “Comfort: A Journey Through Grief” (Norton, 188 pages, $19.95) isn’t a novel or a short story. It is, at least in part, a memoir of her daughter, Grace, a happy, privileged, otherwise healthy little girl who died — so unexpectedly that her sudden illness can be counted in hours — in 2002 from a virulent mutation of streptococcus that ravages the organs. “Comfort” is also, and perhaps primarily, a chronicle of the grief that unmoored Ms. Hood for a very long time after Grace’s death, and of how she found a way to live with it.

“Time doesn’t heal. It just passes,” she writes.

Ms. Hood begins the book with a debunking of clichés such as “Time heals,” a railing against boilerplate that is meant as balm. One of the cruelest predictions about her future without Grace, “In time you will not miss her,” seems to touch her deepest fear. “Comfort” is a slender, keening monument to the overpowering loss that makes her miss her little girl still.

The facts of Grace’s death are alone enough to move a reader to tears, and Ms. Hood understands the danger of tipping irretrievably into the maudlin. For the most part, she escapes that peril, employing spare language to sketch her days, her months, her years of being, as she puts it, “a daughterless mother.”

“Grief is not linear,” she writes:

People kept telling me that once this happened or that passed, everything would be better. Some people gave me one year to grieve. They saw grief as a straight line, with a beginning, middle, and end. But it is not linear. It is disjointed. One day you are acting almost like a normal person. You maybe even manage to take a shower. Your clothes match. You think the autumn leaves look pretty, or enjoy the sound of snow crunching under your feet.

Then a song, a glimpse of something, or maybe even nothing sends you back into the hole of grief. It is not one step forward, two steps back. It is a jumble.

Because some grief has no end, at least not in this lifetime, the only way for Ms. Hood to narrate it is from its vast, disorienting center — a place that is less disabling than its beginning, where, she says, sanity deserted her. “I cannot say how I got from there to here,” she writes. “I cannot even say where ‘here’ is.”

She is lucky, she tells us, in that she and her husband, Lorne, were not torn apart by their loss: “Some statistics say that fifty percent of couples who lose a child get divorced. Some statistics are even higher. It is easy to understand why.” But she and Lorne and Sam, their son, appear a solid unit, cleaving tightly to each other.

There are times when one does not trust some of Ms. Hood’s recollections of moments with Grace, when they seem perhaps too perfect, touched up a bit with a fiction writer’s willful imagination. But if that is ever the case in “Comfort,” who is going to begrudge a mother such an indulgence?

There is one indulgence, however, that shakes one’s faith in her narrative, in the honesty of the seemingly intimate family portrait she has been creating for public consumption. It is this: On page 141, fully three-quarters of the way through the book, she mentions for the first time that she has a teenage stepdaughter. Her husband, that is, is not a daughterless father; he lost not his only daughter, but one of two. Is this the elephant in the room, a fact too painful to confront? Perhaps. But memoir is not fiction; in real life, we only have so much control over our universe, only so much control over our narrative. In a memoir about the death of one daughter in a family, the existence of another cannot reasonably be written out. To do so seems a breathtakingly small-hearted act.

Nonetheless, even that omission demonstrates the hazards that await all of us when we are thrown headlong into the pain of surviving someone we love.

“Comfort” offers solace of a kind that Ms. Hood did not have, a kind that perhaps she would have rejected, had it been offered. But other parents who have lost children, other people who are stumbling their way through loss, will be soothed by it as they try, in Ms. Hood’s words, “to swim to the other side of grief.”