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This memoir is as much about you dealing with a late-term medical abortion as it is about navigating the grief, loss, and processing of your family members.

Throughout Bloodstream, you explore grief and nostalgia for humans (those unborn and those present) and pet dogs alike. You write want. Want to have a few more moments with those passing. Want to have experienced motherhood. Want to make it through these wantings unscathed.

By sharing your understanding of how your mother became the rough-around-the-edges woman you saw during your childhood and young adulthood, you still offer her a space in the narrative. You leave room for speculation.

I want to grow kinder, more considerate as I age, and I would like to be seen as a valuable part of my community, even when I am no longer of service to the workforce. I would hope that as I change, grow, and progress, the duty of care I uphold in my relationships with other people will not only allow the security of a cushion to fall back on, but also a more supportive community at large.

I want to be a woman who is much more than she seems. If my body were to contort and transform the way Sam’s does throughout the novel, I would like that fish — because, let’s face it, I’d be a slimy water-dwelling creature with the absurd number of hours I spend searching for the nearest body of water to swim in — to grow sharp anglerfish teeth to feed and protect itself.

I wonder if this conjuring of my grandmother is what you experience throughout Giving Up the Ghost: A Daughter’s Memoir — if we create the image and persona of those who are not present because our establishing of their voices allows us to analyze a part of us we are otherwise unwilling to confront (i.e., an unwillingness to move on and heal). 

Dear Andrea Leeb, “There’s a part of me that wonders if I’ve made it all up,” I said to my therapist this past winter. In...

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Dear Grace Talusan, When reading your memoir The Body Papers, I’m struck, as I’m sure all your readers are, by the contrast between experiencing prejudice...