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Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief
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About This Book
A collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations. For poet Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered. Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself.
Reviews
"While structurally complex, Dear Memory articulates grief's basic anxieties ..."
"As Chang recounts the death of her mother and what it means to remember, her prose is sharp and strong and her creativity shines in her incorporation of the collage-like visual elements, which add depth."
"The development of Chang's literary philosophy is as important to her as how she views her parents or her memories of past relationships."
"Despite the intimacy of the images, they often still feel ornamental, included to imply history and depth without providing any new information or emotional ground that Chang doesn't already explicitly cover in her letters ..."
"Depending on what one brings to this book, each reader may find their own moment of goosebumps or tears ..."
"The letters that she writes to people from her past show readers how much of what we call 'memory' are the stories we tell ourselves and others, how we make narratives of sense impressions and snatches of remembered conversations."
"Where the letters in the book are searching and digressive, written without expectation of an answer, the interview is a formal, real-time exchange ..."
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