Based in part on the author’s mother’s handwritten memoirs, this novel is an act of bricolage in which the narrator keeps finding gaps in the materials. We desire to regain the past, but every time we attempt it we fabricate it anew. Through various narrative voices, the author discovers a different sense of her mother than she held during her lifetime. This is a type of biographical revisionism. We cannot know the past, especially that of our mothers, but we can re-member them. Meticulously researched, this book constitutes an extended meditation on memory, the strength of memory and its fallibility.