But there is dissonance – Cole's two half-sisters, Billie and Zoe from their father's previous marriage in Sydney come and visit only during holidays, bringing a sudden brittle edge of uncertainty into the young Jessie's life.

The blended family can be a place that leaves all who travel in it wary and weary; when Zoe decides she wants to live with her father, the quiet fabric of Jessie's and Jake's lives is permanently disrupted. But if Jessie can't please Zoe, Zoe, it seems can't please her father, and these misunderstandings are particularly vivid.

There are other tensions too. As a psychiatrist, Cole's father finds it hard to separate work and home and into the hitherto happy marriage creep drinking bouts and fierce fights.

And then, just like that, Zoe and Billie (who also chose to spend time at Burringbar) are grown, moving into their adult lives while those left behind re-assimilate. At the end of "Home", Jessie's father gives her a nest of baby mice, which inevitably die. "I didn't see it as a premonition," writes Cole. "That just because you love something you cannot make it stay."

The next section, "Cataclysm," brings us with brutal clarity to the event that will change the face of this family forever – Zoe's suicide while she is travelling in Holland.

The chaotic storm they live through is almost too much to bear. The eternal why hanging on every page, as Jessie, already an insecure adolescent, disappears inside herself; as she and Jake grow apart, as her father begins to ragingly fall to pieces, seemingly determined to take his wife and children with him.

For their safety their mother moves herself and the children out of the family home but even there they are not immune from their father's madness as he visibly disintegrates in front of their eyes.

Jessie, despite her increasing social isolation, finds solace in the arms of a boy, Gabe, who tries his young best to keep the monsters at bay for her. In a gesture of optimism for the future Jess decides to visit her sister Billie, now living in Japan. She's only there a few days before "it" happens. The girls are rung and told that their father has committed suicide.

In the final section, "Refuge", Jessie attempts to ward off the dark by dropping out of University, and embracing parenthood. In quick succession she and Gabe have two sons, Luca and Milla, but the pressure is too much for Gabe, and soon Jess is a single Mum with two small boys and a hefty dose of PTSD.

As is often the case, it's a random synchronistic moment that begins to trigger Jessie's healing, when an old friend of her father drops in for a visit, and suggests that Jessie's frequent headaches are "untenable". He suggests that she see an Alexander Technique practitioner, and from this tiny step, Jessie begins the journey back to herself – discovering along the way as those of us who have immersed ourselves in her novels, Darkness on the Edge of Town and Deeper Water, can attest that writing is not only her lifeline, but something for which she has a natural and profound talent.

Staying is rich and complex – and often surprisingly funny given its dark subject matter. Above all, this memoir is a meditation on what it means to be traumatised by loss, and ultimately to be healed by life.