The title of Sara Suleri’s memoir, “Meatless Days,” refers to the Pakistani government’s attempt at conservation following its independence from India in 1947. Tuesdays and Wednesdays were decreed “meatless,” meaning no meat would be sold and supposedly none eaten. What it actually meant, recalls Ms. Suleri, was that butchers only worked that much harder on Mondays, since the families that could afford meat could also afford refrigeration. What should have been days of abstinence turned into feasts. Even what she remembers of Ramadan is not the fasts, but the breakfasts. In this elegy of her life and her family, this is the underlying theme: the “abundance of famine,” in Paul Ramsey’s phrase, or, more precisely, what she has gained by loss.

Meatless Days is an extremely personal book, especially to a former student who knows her just well enough to think that some of what Suleri writes about I have no right to know. There is no nakedness like the nakedness of grief, and Suleri is grieving: for her dead Welsh mother, run over by a rickshaw in Lahore; for her murdered sister, knocked down by a car for no reason the police could ever discover; for her Pakistani journalist father, who could not forgive his five children for growing up and growing away, and who finally adopted a new child to take their place.

Meatless Days is well-written, and moving; all the more so because there is a certain heartlessness to the Yale School of criticism, to peeling away meaning for underlying meaning, and it is that much more painful to watch when a writer turns her method on herself. At least Marsyas was flayed by somebody else. “Let us wash the word of murder from her limbs, we said, let us transcribe her into some more seemly idiom. And so with painful labor we placed Ifat’s body in a different discourse, words as private and precise as water when water wishes to perform both in and out of light. Let it lie hidden in my eye, I thought, her tiny spirit, buoyant in the excessive salt of that dead sea . . . “

It is Suleri’s contention that “there are no women in the Third World,” and my assumption that this is one reason why she has written this book; I also assume that this is the reason why she is here in the States, teaching English at Yale, a world apart from Pakistan. But while “ugly, gray” New Haven, so far from where she grew up, is no refuge for Sara Suleri, part of her dilemma is that while she is free to go back, she has chosen to live in exile. What she has gained from so much loss—some of it unstoppable, to be sure, but the rest jettisoned—I am not sure I yet understand. This book, I suppose. But I can see why the ancients equated exile with death, and I think Jonah was never so much at peace as when he was powerless, choiceless, in the belly of the whale.

[Meatless Days, by Sara Suleri (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 186 pp., $17.95]