toastykitten

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn 

Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As a continuation of my speculative fiction palate cleansing reading (LOL), I pick up Youngmi Mayer’s I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying (Little, Brown and Company, 2024), which is a real departure from the other books I’ve read in terms of tone. I have to say: balancing the comedic with the dramatic is incredibly difficult, but Mayer manages to do it in a way that reminds me so much of the Korean American bestie who wants to keep it real with me. In any case, here is the marketing description: “It was a constant truism Youngmi Mayer’s mother would say threateningly after she would make her daughter laugh while crying. Her mother used it to cheer her up in moments when she could tell Youngmi was overtaken with grief. The humorous saying would never fail to lighten the mood, causing both daughter and mother to laugh and cry at the same time. Her mother had learned this trick from her mother, and her mother had learned this from her mother before her: it had also helped an endless string of her family laugh through suffering. In I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, Youngmi jokes through the retelling of her childhood as an offbeat biracial kid in Saipan, a place next to a place that Americans might know. She jokes through her difficult adolescence where she must parent her own parents: a mother who married her husband because he looked like white Jesus (and the singer of The Bee Gees). And with humor and irreverence and full-throated openness, she jokes even while sharing the story of what her family went through during the last century of colonialism and war in Korea, while reflecting how years later, their wounds affect her in New York City as a single mom, all the while interrogating whiteness, gender, and sexuality. Youngmi jokes through these stories in hopes of passing onto the reader what her family passed down to her: The gift of laughing while crying. The gift of a hairy butthole. Because throughout it all, the one thing she learned was one cannot exist without the other. And like a yin and yang, this duality is reflected in this whip-smart, heart-wrenching, and disarmingly funny memoir told by a bright new voice with so much heart and wisdom.”

Mayer grows up in a really challenging milieu. She clearly loves and respects her parents, but they do make things difficult, and there is no question that Mayer’s departure on her own from Korea as a very young adult is partly based upon the instability of her home growing up. To become independent would mean to find the means to support herself without any of the complicated strings that might come with family. Indeed, it’s unclear to me if she has been in touch with any family members since coming to the United States. The early chapters of the memoir detail her itinerant life. Mayer, though born in the United States, is soon whisked off to many locations, including Korea and Saipan. She makes her way back to the United States, lands in Palo Alto at first, then heads up to San Francisco. These early sequences in America have a dark humor to them: she finds a good deal in a sublet in Treasure Island. She can’t believe her luck, until we all find out that she’s actually in a place filled with methamphetamine addicted residents. She eventually moves out (thankfully) and also eventually finds a measure of financial stability, all the while embarking on a life-changing relationship with Danny Bowien, who himself will find major success as a chef. There were points in this memoir where I wasn’t sure if I should be shocked or amused, but that’s part of the point of the title: that there’s a thin line often between what we find traumatic and what we find funny. Mayer makes the most of making those lines blur, emphasizing that the comedic is a palliative to the strange and often challenging obstacles that life throws our way. Mayer will end the memoir realizing that she has always wanted to be a stand-up comedian, and she ultimately lets go of all these things holding her back. She finds her most fulfillment at this stage in life, admitting that everything before seems primarily as an in-between, limbo space, where she has been sort of living life without a fully realized purpose. The concluding arc also has some pretty frank ruminations on new motherhood, including the revelatory moment that the body has these incredible capacities to help support the life of a developing living entity. Before reading this memoir, I hadn’t known much about Mayer’s stand-up career. There is something about this particular moment, where there are different levels of fame and social visibility, as we are atomized across media platforms. I’ll definitely be looking out for Mayer in the future.
 

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Tor.com is always at the forefront of shorter novels and novellas. Such is the case with Nghi Vo’s latest publication The City in Glass (Tor.com, 2024). I’m a huge fan of Vo. The Chosen and The Beautiful, her brilliant re-writing of The Great Gatsby tickled my global modernist sensibilities. It reminded me of the similarly brilliant work by Monique Truong in her supplementary narrative to Stein’s Toklas in The Book of Salt. I am still awaiting other great modernist re-writes by Asian American authors! In any case, let’s let the marketing description do some work for us: “The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot. And then the angels come, and the city falls. Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned. She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other’s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever. Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again. The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to reduce a world to ashes and remake it anew.”

I didn’t read much paratextual material going into this one, so I was pretty surprised at how the narrative develops. This one reminds me a bit of Wang’s rental house, because the plot is frankly minimal. Instead, much like Wang’s work (despite the radical difference in genre), the focus is really on relationships. In this case, the anchor of this text is Vitrine’s antagonistic connection to a fallen Angel. Vitrine naturally hates the Angel, but over the course of the text, we see their relationship evolve. At first enemies, the Angel comes to understand Vitrine’s love for humans, with all of their flaws, over the course of narrative. He comes to exist in a position similar to Vitrine in the sense that he watches over the humans and begins to have investments in their survival, success, and overall well-being. At first, the Angel is judgmental, dismissive, and imperious, but his tethering to Azril changes and humbles him. The one element of this text that I wanted more was related to world-building elements involving the angels and demons. Vo gives us just enough to understand that demons have an ability to transform into other beings; they also can seem to carve and to alter material elements before them. They can compose themselves of different things, and they can reformulate their bodies even if they are seemingly disintegrated. Angels seem to be generally impervious as well, but they cannot engage in questionable activities. They cannot lie or steal, so the Angel’s ability to intervene in the lives of mortals is decidedly limited. In other words, the Angel sometimes needs Vitrine’s explicit help once he becomes enmeshed in the lives of mortals. The ending—and here, I will provide my requisite spoilers, so look away at this point lest you want to discover what occurs between the two—was perhaps not what I wanted for these two characters. I appreciated their antagonists and even their mutual respect, which has accrued essentially over centuries, but I didn’t see them as a romantic pairing at all. While a minor quibble, I did absolutely adore Vitrine’s attachments to the mortals. She archives them through a book she holds inside of herself, and throughout the text, we get a sense of the history of Azril and all that were lost when the Angels destroyed the city. In this way, the text ultimately becomes a kind of grief archive, one that exists in the elastic bounds of the speculative fictional world.

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Written by Stephen Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As you know, we occasionally set our sights to other allied communities and writers of varying BIPOC backgrounds. One of our favorite writers is none other than the prolific Louise Erdrich, who graces us with another brilliant novel: The Mighty Red (Harper, 2024)! This robust marketing description gives us quite a bit of information: “In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding.  Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.  Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.   Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own. Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day. The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.”

As is common for Erdrich, there are always a ton of characters, but Erdrich is an obvious pro and knows exactly how to cultivate the depth of these figures, even down to the most minor of these individuals in terms of their import to the plots. I will admit: the first 1/3 of the novel or so I found taxing: the central love triangle between Kismet, Gary, and Hugo just sort of drove me crazy, but I suppose I don’t give enough room for the messiness that is young love. In any case, I eventually settled into these dynamics, especially because we discover the reason behind much of these complicated and dysfunctional connections. The other main elements involve the older residents of the town, the thirty, forty and fiftysomethings or so that are the older generation above Kismet, Gary, and Hugo. There’s a book club that links most of the major female characters. Hugo’s mom, Bev owns a bookstore Bev’s Bookery, that brings these women together. Kismet’s mom Crystal is in a strained marital relationship with a man named Martin. Then there’s the fact that there’s been a major tragedy that befell the town some months back that has impacted all of the youth there. This latter issue is the one that was the most surprising to me, as it emerges in the back end of the text. The community generally talks around what has happened but when we finally get to see what it is that is keeping some of the characters so guarded, the novel really gains momentum as some actual healing and reconnection can begin. What I loved best about this book though is something that I haven’t seen in Erdrich before: I feel as though Erdrich always pushes herself stylistically and, in this novel, she uses more clipped sentences than I’ve seen in the past. It is also paired with a sly humorous undertone that I think is more prominent than other novels that I’ve read. There’s also the way that Erdrich will just come up and surprise you with a narrative sleight of hand. There’s always a little bit of magic and mischief in Erdrich’s fictional world: a ghost will pop up in this novel’s case and then there’s the fact that a short chapter is taken from the perspective of a river and how it handles the various beings that fall in it. If there is a minor quibble it’s that twenty years pass by in the blink of a couple pages at the conclusion, which suggests that there might have been hundreds of pages of material for a different novel. After all, Erdrich is the one who has been compared to Faulkner for quite some time, and we can see how maybe there might have been more threads to pull together for another story. Whatever the case, Erdrich is clearly at her heights of creative genius, and we are all the more fortunate for how productive she has been as a writer and as an artist.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Melody S. Gee’s We Carry Smoke & Paper: Essays on the Grief and Hope of Conversion (University of Iowa Press, 2024) is my continuing work to give myself a break from all of those high intensity speculative fictions I’ve read over the past year. When I originally picked up this one, I didn’t read much paratextual material, so I was pleasantly surprised by all of its religious content. I say “pleasantly,” because this text is one that I know my mother would have loved to have read (she was a huge fan of accessible religious philosophy and Gee certainly comes from this lineage as well), and so I found myself thinking a lot about her while reading it. These are the unexpected gifts of reading. Let’s move to the marketing description: “Answering an unexpected call to faith in her thirties, Melody Gee contends with what saying “yes” to conversion requires of an adopted daughter of Chinese immigrants. Faced with a new framework for her place in the world, grief and doubt shadow her tentative steps toward becoming a believer. She looks for answers and consolation in her family’s story of immigration trauma and cultural assimilation, in the ways their burdens and limitations made her answer-seeking both impossible and inevitable. In essays that explore the parallels between conversion and language acquisition, isolated liturgies, cultural inheritances, stalled initiations, disrupted storytelling, and adoption, Gee examines conversion’s grief and hope, losses and gains, hauntings and promises. We Carry Smoke and Paper is a memoir about what we owe to those who sacrifice everything for us, and it is about the many conversions in a lifetime that turn our heads via whispers and shouts, calling us to ourselves.”

So, I read this one not long after Amy Lee Scott’s essay collection, and they do have some similarities. While Scott’s work often paired the personal with the apocalyptic, the ordering framework of Gee’s text is to rethink her family and personal life in the context of her conversion to Catholicism. Also, both authors are adopted, so that element does become important for both texts. What I found especially engaging about Gee’s essay collection is the way she is so reflective about her immigrant background and family. One of the standout essays, “Chinese American” focuses on the unique genealogy of her loved ones, who come to California, but essentially isolate themselves ethnically while they build a life around a restaurant. The other part of this essay that is so striking is the way that Gee comes to understand her grandfather more fully after he has passed away. Indeed, Gee uses the essay as a way to address a sense of lack: “In the eulogy I should have written, my grandfather was born on February 2, 1914,” but this is only an American date and we never celebrated it” (39). Gee thus employs this essay in part to address something she felt she should have done around the time her grandfather passed away. I found this moment particularly compelling, and it serves as a way to consider creative nonfiction as a realm that can address things latently. I found that the essays in this collection accrued more might and import, as I read on. Toward the conclusion, “Redemption Story,” functions as one of Gee’s strongest essays. It delves into Gee’s mother and her immigration history, which is set amongst the turbulent Chinese modernization of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Given the continual movement that Gee’s mother experiences due to political instability and migration, Gee comes to the conclusion that her mother is a kind of perpetual exile, and that she must be better at coming to terms with some of her mother’s idiosyncrasies. The essay following that one, “Two Adoptions,” elegantly considers Gee’s background as an adoptee, on the one hand, and her decision to convert to Catholicism, on the other. In both contexts, Gee meditates upon what it means to find a home, however metaphorical or alternative it may be. Gee ultimately leaves us with the insight that, whatever (difficult) path we might take or are forced to traverse, we should find our spiritual center and keep the faith. A uniquely positioned work that combines the best in Asian American creative nonfiction with religious philosophy and spirituality.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I’ve been toggling for whatever reason between a lot of high fantasy and memoir. I guess that’s just the reading mood I’ve been in for the last couple of months. I’ve especially been catching up on the so-called Asian-inspired fantasy trend, which is pretty much everywhere and frankly its own market now, with dozens of titles coming out year after year. The next one that appeared on my radar was Sue Lynn Tan’s Daughter of the Moon Goddess (Harper Voyager, 2022), which is a super engrossing read and certainly one I’d recommend for fans of this genre. Let’s let the marketing description move us a bit forward on this book:  “Growing up on the moon, Xingyin is accustomed to solitude, unaware that she is being hidden from the feared Celestial Emperor who exiled her mother for stealing his elixir of immortality. But when Xingyin’s magic flares and her existence is discovered, she is forced to flee her home, leaving her mother behind. Alone, powerless, and afraid, she makes her way to the Celestial Kingdom, a land of wonder and secrets. Disguising her identity, she seizes an opportunity to learn alongside the emperor’s son, mastering archery and magic, even as passion flames between her and the prince. To save her mother, Xingyin embarks on a perilous quest, confronting legendary creatures and vicious enemies. But when treachery looms and forbidden magic threatens the kingdom, she must challenge the ruthless Celestial Emperor for her dream—striking a dangerous bargain in which she is torn between losing all she loves or plunging the realm into chaos. Daughter of the Moon Goddess begins an enchanting duology which weaves ancient Chinese mythology into a sweeping adventure of immortals and magic, of loss and sacrifice—where love vies with honor, dreams are fraught with betrayal, and hope emerges triumphant.”

This description doesn’t outline that there is a central romance triangle, which is absolutely instrumental to our engagement with the plot! Xingyin does eventually become enamored with the prince of the Celestial Emperor. Xingyin and Liwei seem like a pretty good pair, until the readers eventually find out that that Liwei has already been promised for marriage to another! GASP! Xingyin ends up deciding to go her own way and part of that process involves getting work in the celestial army, working under Captain Wenzhi. Whereas the sparks immediately flew with Liwei, things work at a slower pace with Wenzhi, but eventually, Xingyin develops feelings for Wenzhi, thus leading to our central romance triangle. There are various adventures which occur throughout this novel: Xingyin must battle merfolk, dragons, and demons, all with the ultimate intent that she might find a way back to her mother. She must also figure out how to pivot around the Celestial Emperor and Empress, who at various points drive Xingyin into specific actions which could endanger her life. One of the most perilous sections is a kind of trap: Xingyin is tasked to retrieve the pearls of dragons, not realizing that in doing so, she would be forcing the dragons to give up their agency. Xingyin, with her ethically centered self, always manages to find a way around such obstacles, and this aspect of her personality is what grounds this novel at every point, despite the hazards she consistently faces. But back to this romance plot: Despite the fact that Wenzhi seems like a good match (after all, he *is* single), Xingyin continually finds her thoughts moving back to Liwei. And here I will provide us all with the requisite spoiler warning, so please turn away unless you want to find out what all goes down. Though using what I would consider to be a common twist, Tan is able to cover it up in a way that, at least for me, produces a serious level of surprise. What you eventually find out is that Wenzhi is not who we thought he was. He is in fact the heir to the demon realm, and Xingyin must eventually defeat him in order to save Liwei and the more broadly the Celestial Kingdom. For her efforts Xingyin does eventually gain the favor that she wants. Her mother is freed from her imprisonment, and she will be  allowed to return to her mother without fear of reprisal from the Emperor. Overall, I really enjoyed this one; it’s quite different from the other Asian-inspired fantasies I’ve read. Many in the kingdom are immortals and most have various powers that enable them to defeat magical monsters and figures. Tan’s world building is both assured and expansive, letting readers into a rich world filled with memorable characters.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan 

Well, as I continue trying to balance all that speculative fiction reading, I’ve been doing, I’ve been turning to creative nonfiction. This imprint called Mad Creek Books over at Ohio State University Press has been putting out some high-quality publications in creative nonfiction. Such is the case with Grace Loh Prasad’s The Translator’s Daughter (Mad Creek Books, 2024), which is an outstanding memoir that covers her transnational life, the life of her parents, and the bonds she continues to construct in the wake of the deaths of family members. Let’s let the official marketing description give us more context: “Born in Taiwan, Grace Loh Prasad was two years old when the threat of political persecution under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship drove her family to the United States, setting her up to become an “accidental immigrant.” The family did not know when they would be able to go home again; this exile lasted long enough for Prasad to forget her native Taiwanese language and grow up American. Having multilingual parents—including a father who worked as a translator—meant she never had to develop the fluency to navigate Taiwan on visits. But when her parents moved back to Taiwan permanently when she was in college and her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she recognized the urgency of forging a stronger connection with her birthplace before it was too late. As she recounts her journey to reclaim her heritage in The Translator’s Daughter, Prasad unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, and loss in all their rich complexity. The result is a unique immigration story about the loneliness of living in a diaspora, the search for belonging, and the meaning of home.”

This description perfectly encapsulates the basis for this memoir. Prasad’s father engages in translations of the Bible, so Prasad in effect always has someone in her family who can help her with linguistic deficits anytime she is in Taiwan. The opening of the memoir is remarkable for the story Prasad relays about being detained in Taiwan for accidentally bringing an expired passport. She wasn’t flagged before getting into the country, and Taiwan has very strict rules. Prasad would have to get her passport somehow flown to her within 24 hours or she would be forced to leave. Given the length of the flight and the challenges of international travel, she does anything she can to get the passport to her, which includes trying to flag down a locksmith and even calling upon an ex-boyfriend to find the passport in her apartment and to get it on a plane to her. I can’t recall whether or not she had to pay for a seat on a flight to get it to Taiwan, but I am hoping not. Despite these instabilities, she ends up being able to stay, and things go on as best as they can. Yet things do eventually take a turn: her mother’s Alzheimer’s begins to worsen, while her father struggles to as the primary caretaker. Prasad has to find a way to balance her commitments to her growing family in the United States as with her responsibilities to her aging parents. Another wrench is thrown into the transnational equation when her brother is unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer and dies in less than a year. Then, her mother passes away, not from the complications of Alzheimer’s but from a late-stage diagnosis of colon cancer. Writing about her mother’s illness progression, Prasad notes, “I, however, cannot reverse the decline. I have no magic that will physically bring my mom back to wholeness, back to life. My only choice is to re-member her, to re-constitute her, through my writing” (141). This moment is of course one of the pivotal ways that creative writing offers solace in the face of loss, however partial this salve may be. Prasad’s father will also eventually succumb to various complications that arise from Parkinson’s, leaving Prasad without any nuclear family anchors to Taiwan, even though she knows that this homeland calls not only to her but also to her children. One of the most affecting chapters then is the last one, which takes the epistolary form of a letter to her son. Prasad gives her son a kind of map for the places she knows he will be interested in, the places that have been formative for their family. In this way, Prasad prepares for the time when she may not be there to guide him and thus acknowledges the limits that we all face on Earth. An emotionally-wrenching and beautifully crafted memoir.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan 

As you might know, I’ve been adding a bunch more creative nonfiction to my reading lists. I decided to mix it up a little bit and shift toward a graphic memoir. In this case, I’m reviewing Tessa Hull’s truly amazing debut Feeding Ghosts (MCD, 2024). It’s been a while since I’ve read a graphic memoir like this one, and it ranks with the best of them: G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Belle Yang’s Forget Sorrow… these three are some that exist at the absolute pinnacle of the graphic memoir genre due to their textured explorations of transnational history and diasporic consciousness. Let’s let the marketing description assist us a bit further: “An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity. In her acclaimed graphic memoir debut, Tessa Hulls traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in her family. Tessa’s grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival—then promptly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. Growing up with Sun Yi, Tessa watches both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, and bolts to the most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away. Feeding Ghosts is Tessa’s homecoming, a vivid, heartbreaking journey into history that exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.”

 This graphic memoir is truly an ambitious, sweeping, and thorough excavation of both personal and structural histories. I especially loved the way that Hulls works painstakingly to show how her mother’s and grandmother’s lives were intimately wound through the major upheavals of Chinese modern history, including the Japanese invasion, the rise of the KMT and the ensuing political fissures (The Great Leap Forward/ The Cultural Revolution), and the rise of Mao Zedong. Sun Yi gains a measure of success from her memoir, but the many ghosts that are pursuing her become too much, and she begins to exhibit signs of mental illness that will later overtake her life. Sun Yi’s inability to recover from her mental illness, or at least have some form of treatment for it, causes her daughter (Hulls’ mother) to become Sun Yi’s caretaker for the most part. The problem with this dynamic is that Hulls’ mother lives in a perpetual state of interdependence and heightened anxiety, which will later be projected onto Hulls herself. This predicament leads to a complicated home life when Hulls grows up in coastal California. Hulls’s memoir is obviously deeply researched: not only does Hulls travel to China multiple times to get a stronger sense of the spatial past that involves her mother and grandmother, but she also works to learn Mandarin (to communicate with her family). She also obviously must learn much about Chinese history. Scaffolding Hulls’ compelling personal story and political engagements are her brilliant illustrations. There is so much detail going on here, and Hulls really drives home the hungry ghosts tropes throughout the text. Returning images as well as the motif of something Hulls calls the “ghost twin” help clarify the impact of intergenerational trauma on succeeding generations. While Hulls’ mother has this “ghost twin” to reign in challenging emotional experiences, Hulls’ alter ego is none other than a cowboy, who lives free and roams far and wide around the world. I wonder if Hulls must have read Scott McCloud’s work because Hulls also consistently breaks the fourth wall to interrupt the narrative and speak directly to the reader. I loved these moments, as they provided a break from the difficult subject material but also generated an analytical auto-theoretical voice that put her perspective into context with her mother’s. The nuance of this approach is that Hulls reveals how her mother’s viewpoint on a given topic could be radically different than her own and that Hulls could not claim to have the sole perspective. Another really compelling aspect of this memoir is that it is really clear how collaborative it was: Hulls knows that her mother had to be integrated deeply into this writing process and that she couldn’t just share whatever she wanted. There is a level of restraint and care in this memoir that shows us that to tell a family history is also to dwell in a place where ethics and representation must intertwine. In this delicate balance mediating confession and reticence, Hulls’ deeply imagined, exquisitely crafted memoir truly and brilliantly soars. A home run with bases loaded.

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