THE HISTORY WE CARRY

In Whitford’s memoir, a grieving daughter deconstructs a difficult relationship with her mother.

Although the author was away in Paris when her mother died, that didn’t stop her from feeling an overwhelming sense of grief. Indeed, she seems haunted by regret throughout this memoir—for choosing not to be there when her mother needed her most, and for not having a stronger relationship with her. Yet she recognizes that there’s a reason for their distance, most notably her own unhappiness as an eldest child caught between warring parents. Whitford further attributes their troubled relationship to her mother’s past as a Latvian immigrant and survivor of wartime displacement, which she has dutifully recorded and recounts here. As a young Latvian woman living through World War II, Whitford’s mother survived both Soviet and German occupations, not to mention the troubled relationship between her own parents. Having come of age during the war, she suffered from both physical and emotional trauma, experiences that likely affected her ability to bond with her children later on. Whitford’s account of her mother’s life and the relationship they shared is as insightful as it is tragic, yet readers will still find an undeniable closeness between mother and daughter in these pages. These memories make up a large portion of the memoir, but Whitford also focuses on her own recollections, allowing the narrative to move fluidly through personal memory and historical reflection. While occasionally meandering, Whitford’s narrative voice manages to invite readers into this odd mother-daughter relationship, creating a nuanced portrait of grief, memory, and reconciliation. Ultimately, the memoir presents a loving but often troubled relationship, littered with scars from the past, but one that many readers will likely resonate with and understand: particularly those who have grappled with complicated family histories of their own.

An unflinching, well-rendered memoir that generously encompasses love, trauma, and the fraught relationship between a mother and daughter.