Description:A daughter returns home to the Navajo reservation to retrace her mother's life in a memoir that is both a narrative and an archive of one family’s troubled history
“An honest, intimate, and heart-wrenching memoir that explores the fractured family, the damaging effects of alcoholism and poverty, and what it means to seek healing from the legacies of trauma.”—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of the National Book Award finalist Sabrina & Corina
When Danielle Geller’s mother dies of alcohol withdrawal during an attempt to get sober, Geller returns to Florida and finds her mother’s life packed into eight suitcases. Most were filled with clothes, except for the last one, which contained diaries, photos, and letters, a few undeveloped disposable cameras, dried sage, jewelry, and the bandana her mother wore on days she skipped a hair wash.
Geller, an archivist and a writer, uses these...