Part memoir, part meditation on death itself, In the Slender Margin is an exploration of death from an "insider's point of view";. Using the threads of her brother's early demise and her twenty years of work at a hospice, Joseph utilizes history, religion, pop culture, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology and poetry to discern the unknowable and to illuminate her travels through the land of the dying. This book was written as a way for Joseph to understand what she had seen: the mysterious and the horrendous.

While most books that approach the subject of death do so from a medical or psychological point of view, In the Slender Margin is neither an academic text nor a self-help manual. It is unique in that it is a rumination through art and ideas on the greatest mystery that awaits us all

Replete with literary allusions and references ranging from Joan Didion and Susan Sontag to D.H Lawrence and Voltaire, In the Slender Margin is an absorbing and inspired consideration of how we die and how we deal with death.