The human concerns Cho centers in her writing—the project of loving specific people, of remembrance—are as real and immediate as anyone’s living. This is not to say the archives she engages, and the one she enacts, are not also alive, but that Cho has managed a deft presentation of an uncertain and critically underserved past.

... intimate.

Cho has been writing this book as 'equal parts therapy and eulogy' as she laid bare her achingly symbiotic relationship with her enigmatic mother. Nearly two decades since Koonja’s mysterious death, Cho write[s] her back into existence, to let her legacy live on the page, and in so doing, trace [Cho’s] own.' The spectacular result is both an exquisite commemoration and a potent reclamation..

A Korean immigrant and sociology professor reevaluates her mother's past and their fraught relationship.

In this probing, vividly written memoir, charged with the pain of losing 'the person I loved most in the world,' Cho moves fluidly around in time, touching on difficult as well as happy memories.