“Keeping the Conversation Going: A Daughter Speaks to her Mother Across the Memory Loss Divide” is the title of this moving short memoir by Margaret Morgenroth Gullette, author of the brilliant Agewise. The abyss, of course, is memory loss, and Gullette describes learning to focus on the very real pleasures in what remains. “My mother, too, was a self — living, often contentedly, on islands of land in the abyss,” she writes. “I made a decision to live with her on those islands.”