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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
"Though Chang's memoir is written in letters, attaching itself to a plot with only the most delicate threads, what emerges is a picture of a woman searching for a way to use words and tangible forms to observe and reshape the world."
"Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem."
"In fact, the cut-and-paste photos and documents are, in most cases, awkwardly juxtaposed with the text."
"In a series of letters addressed to those who play a part in her memories, she explores with tenderness and compassion the ways that all of us construct our stories of what lies both in our family's past and in our own lives ..."
"Depending on what one brings to this book, each reader may find their own moment of goosebumps or tears ..."
"Mixing official documents, handwritten notes, photographs, and correspondence, she creates a moving consideration of ancestry and loss ..."
"A child may feel as though the hand she holds will never let go; a mother may think that the child is 'hers.' Neither is right."
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