She was born July 1, 1961 amid summer’s flowering and died Aug. 31, 1997 as it withered. And like summer itself, her season was too brief.

Everyone living at the time remembers where he was when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. But many of us remember, too, where we were when Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car accident in a Paris tunnel.

I was in my aunt’s room watching TV when a news bulletin came on saying she had broken her arm in the accident. I went to bed and woke up early the next morning – a Sunday, just as Aug. 31 falls on a Sunday this year – knowing without knowing why I knew that she was already dead. Then came the phone call that every journalist simultaneously dreads and lives for, an editor’s voice saying, “Do you have the TV on?” I spent that day, my mother’s birthday, and the rest of the week watching and covering the extraordinary events that unfolded, transforming the Princess of Wales from ex-wife, mother and celebrity into a secular martyr, saint and goddess.

As her death had a transcendent trajectory, so, too, did her life – a far more interesting one. The woman once known as “Shy Di” came of age in a post-feminist era. ...