Raw Material

I have folders of material that I didn’t use in We Take Our Cities With Us: A Memoir. At various points, I wrote about images that I’d excavated during the research into my mother’s life, a process that (I realize now) I adopted from researching my novels. These paragraphs do not appear in the book, but they helped write it anyway.

1.

’ve studied my mother’s photo albums for months, yet the two-inch black-and-white photograph, can only be my father, and I imagine the photograph as one of several my parents exchanged in onion-skin or linen-paper letters, hopeful that images would bridge absence and distance. I shouldn’t, but before I scan the photograph and send it to my siblings, I trace my mother’s young face, radiant with concentrated love, and wonder if my father did the same and whether his fingerprints, like his life, are now forever mingled with mine.