Hal and Orin on the phone: JOI's suicide
I went in and presented with textbook-perfect symptoms of denial, bargaining, anger, still more denial, depression. I listed my seven textbook choices and vacillated plausibly between and among them. […] The grief-therapist was having none of it. […] This grief-therapist hung on like a Gila monster. I even tried telling him I really didn’t feel anything.
Context
Hal narrating the grief-therapy ordeal that followed his finding Himself's body at thirteen: he chewed through the Copley Square library's grief section and performed the stages perfectly, and the performance failed precisely because it was one. The buried lede sits in the last sentence — the feels-nothing crisis stated as just one more failed strategy.