All my life, my mother had confided in me, sharing her frustrations over finances, accounts of babies she fell in love with as a nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit, gossip about her friends, and visions for a remodeled house she never managed to get approved by the city. But in her later years, when her dementia came on strong and suddenly, she told me stories from her past that I had never heard before.
I was spending half my days at my parents’ house by then. The pandemic made it possible for me to work remotely, and leaving the two alone for long stretches no longer felt safe. My mother would appear behind me and stare at my computer screen, my technical descriptions of scientific projects nonsensical to her, though I could feel her straining to understand. I took her hand and waited, and eventually she would speak, offering me another story about her marriage to my father. Most of them included another woman he was once in love with.
My novel, The Outer Country, was far along by that point. In it, I described my parents’ first days in America, their meeting, their courtship, their marriage. I was aware of his affair, but I didn’t include it in my story because it seemed too one-dimensional, too cliché.
My mother, however, described something more epic.
Another man was involved—the mistress’s boyfriend. The four of them were all aware of one another, and confrontations at gatherings were fiery. At one point, according to my mother, a gun was involved. My father wanted to shoot this other man because he couldn’t bear to lose his mistress. Yet he was so drunk that the only way he could get to the other man’s apartment was if my mother drove him, something, thankfully, she refused to do.
Hearing this, I wasn’t sure what to believe. My mother was struggling to maintain her freedom, and she sometimes resorted to lying to get her way. She lied about drinking enough water, secretly dehydrating herself to avoid wetting the bed. She lied about needing her keys, telling us she wanted to nap inside the car, when what she really wanted was to go grocery shopping on her own. I had never heard these details about my father’s affair, but I did have a vague memory that supported them. Once, as a child, I found a gun hidden under his nightstand. The handle caught the light, and I tugged it toward me an inch or two before getting spooked and returning it to its place. If my mother was telling the truth, I wanted to know so I could better understand my family. Each time she repeated her story, I listened for discrepancies, but they never came. Her account of the incident only grew more vivid, as if her mind was waking up again, and I eventually came to accept it.
Reconstructing family stories has required the excavation of memory from different sources. The most obvious are the photo albums my mother organized over the years: one with my brother’s photos, one with mine, one covering her immigration to America, one from my parents’ wedding day. My mother’s later stories combined with what she told me when I was younger. She rarely offered accounts of her past then, but she always answered my questions when I asked her about it. I had an aunt who enjoyed telling stories. She filled in helpful details about their childhood, though she tended to exaggerate. Then, there were the memories I couldn’t make sense of, frightening and confusing fragments. For decades these remnants of my childhood lay dormant and waiting.
No single memory, on its own, can offer a complete picture. Maybe no amount of research ever will. I choose fiction as my genre so that I can embrace imagination as part of the reconstruction process. I find value in searching for the truth, even if I don’t put it on the page. It reminds me that every detail has the potential to uncover another story, and every story can be told from a different point of view. The act of writing often invites us to fit the pieces together as part of the demand for logic, the old stories stitched together with the new, unreliable details from a mother with dementia connected to a fading image of a gun under a nightstand.