My memory used to be my party trick. Well into my twenties, I told people I could remember exactly what I was doing on any given date back to about 1994. This wasn’t a lie. It felt true to me. My memory was dense and rich, like good soil, and I could sink into it up to my elbows.

I closed my eyes, visualized flipping back through a Rolodex. Through the power of inference, sense recollection, and a strong recall for times and places, I could generate a specific description. “March 2, 1998? We were learning about the Songhai Empire in Social Studies. After school I did homework and then I had swim practice. We got Trattoria Peppino delivery for dinner and I ate it watching ER with my family.”

(Writing this, I chose the date of March 2, 1998 at random, because I thought I couldn’t really do this anymore. Around when I turned thirty, my memory changed. Instead of a Rolodex, I now have a filing cabinet, with a flattened series of Rolodex cards inside each manila folder, which are collected inside hanging folders labeled by year, and yes, I did and do visualize all of this when retrieving a memory. But I can in fact recall March 1998 with a high degree of clarity. I didn’t choose March 1, because I know I attended a swim meet on that day—Junior Districts, my last year doing so, probably the pinnacle of my middle school swim career; I medaled in every event because all other swimmers of any renown in my age group had qualified for Districts. I stayed away from the middle and end of the month, because that’s when my family went on an emotionally complex spring break vacation to Mexico with a law school friend of my father’s who turned out to have gone off his meds and spent the whole time antagonizing my sister and I, trying to get us to babysit his toddler, and pursuing much younger women. I got the worst sunburn of my life swimming in my first Victoria’s Secret underwear set at the beach in Tulum. I can still do it! In fact!)

It seemed to impress people, my going inward, churning my past into a consumable anecdote. I liked the attention—I have always liked the attention, despite also being shy—but that wasn’t why I did it. Parading the sharpness of my memory is a hedge against loss. A way of keeping everything present forever.

Are my journeys into my memory a kind of meditation? When I try to practice stillness, to escape my “monkey mind,” I sink either into to-do lists of the present or slip back into the texture of the past. I understand that from certain points of view, the point of meditation is to resist these digressions, to stay in an empty now. But my mind looks like my conversation sounds: discursive, wandering, labyrinthine. The spiral path is innate to me. Sometimes, when I feel I have been most successful meditating, it is because I have recovered a detail from memory that previously eluded me—something lost or buried that troubles an established narrative in my personal history.

My mother was a sort-of Buddhist, a kind-of-Catholic. A large Thai buddha she’d bought in Washington, D.C. when she lived there in the 1970s sat in a place of pride beside our front door, beneath a near-scale reproduction of the Unicorn Tapestry called “Taste.” She loved the Zen Page-A-Day calendar. She kept it wherever she was most in the house at that time—on her rolltop desk in the kitchen, next to the computer in the study, on the table that was her workspace in the living room for a while—and taped pages she especially liked on the kitchen cabinets, on her bathroom mirror, anywhere she might see them regularly.

When I try to remember what these favorite pages of my mother’s said, I recall only one, which read

But I can find no evidence that this quotation was ever said by Chanel or by anyone—Google offers many articles about how people should be happy at their jobs—and anyway, whatever the page I remember said, I think it was one that my dad chose from the calendar as a favorite, not my mom. Her actual favorites linger at the very edge of my memory, sweet, profound, out of reach.

I suspect it was from the Zen Page-A-Day Calendar that my mother learned the work Kenshō, a Japanese zen term meaning “seeing one’s true nature,” a concept she liked enough to put on her license plate. During my freshman year of high school, she picked me up every day in a red SUV whose vanity plate others sometimes interpreted as “Ken’s Ho.”

As far as I know, my mom never had a formal meditation practice. Buddhism for her was reading about Buddhism, appreciating its art, enjoying the quiet solemnity that could be found in Buddhist spaces and in films about Buddhist lives. There were some flirtations with Zen centers, places like that, but my mother was never one for joining. She liked visiting, not staying.

The idea of Buddhism offered a language and justification for her innate practice of kindness and non-judgment, as well as the ideal, at least, of perfect calm, just as her temporal embrace of Catholicism after converting to marry my father constituted a way back to the Virgin Mary cult of her childhood in a French convent school. Both faith practices offered an impenetrable veneer of seriousness to protect her vulnerable and soft need to feel safe. Neither inspired her to become orthodox in her beliefs.

My mother was allergic to dogma. (I wrote, and deleted, and include here again, a second clause in that sentence, calling her “a true iconoclast.”) She was not at all drawn to the kind of mundane repetition through which a certain type of profundity can be reached. Although she had the dream, the time, means, and resources to do so, she was never able to establish a regular practice as an artist. For years she paid the rent on a studio she never visited. The day we went to clean it out with her at my father’s insistence shimmers with pain in my memory.

At some point—I can’t remember exactly when, but my feeling is that it was in the last five years of her life, a way of defining time that I dislike because it charges all of that time with a grim backward anticipation, of course we did not know it was the last five years of her life, not that anyone really knows that, but I think the untimely loss of a loved one (and, again, what is untimely) makes a cult in the mind of a kind of long-anticipated senescent death in the nineties as the platonic ideal, although as I hurtle through my own life that, too, seems too soon—my mother told me that she did meditate.

What she meant by this was that she spent time, at the beginning and at the end of the day, when she was in bed, putting away her troubles and anxieties and becoming calm and resolved. “I just try to feel very relaxed and easy and sleepy,” she said.

Undoubtedly I had called her in an anxious panic, wanting the comfort and reassurance she always gave me. As always, she tried to give me actionable advice. (Once, at wit’s end with my sorrow, she asked if I ever listened to the Pharrell Williams song “Happy.”)

“I put myself in a state of mind so I can rest,” she said. “And then in the morning, I decide to have a good day. I spend some time creating a feeling of positivity and happiness.” She suggested I try this.

I don’t know how long she did this. I don’t know how she did it. What I remember of this description is as distinct from my forays into the world of manifestation meditation as it is from the videotapes of Tibetan monks chanting in stone rooms that she showed me when I was a child.

Later, there was a time when it seems to me she was no longer doing the meditation she described, but as I type that, and I think of her generally kind demeanor through the very difficult final weeks of her life, I know that I am wrong. She meditated until the end.

But this practice was not something she gave me at the beginning of my own life. I had to seek out my own experiments in consciousness, my own changes of reality.

In 1993, when I was nine, my family went to see the Dalai Lama address the centennial session of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Grant Park. It was a hot summer day, and I brought with me an enormous pickle, as large as my forearm, which I planned to eat throughout the event. I remember the thunderous oming of the monks on the dais, and that we couldn’t understand much that the Dalai Lama said because the PA system was bad.

For years afterwards my mom made us giggle by imitating the sound of the monks chanting. She loved the tone and timbre of that long vowel. Its richness, the way it split the afternoon into evening.

Recent Reads

Time’s Mouth by Edan Lepucki

Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace

The two books I’ve read since my last newsletter both deal with the problems of memory and of love—and memory, it occurs to me, might be one of the many other words for love that Carvell Wallace leads the reader to throughout his moving, hard to categorize debut. Time’s Mouth was the first book I’ve read by Edan Lepucki, a writer whose work I’ve long been aware of both generally and specifically, as a fellow L.A.-based author. I bought my copy of her most recent novel at Northtown Books, a lovely independent bookstore in Arcata, while visiting my brother-in-law there in October. I’d seen the cover and short summaries of the plot somewhere or other, and it felt like a book for me—set in Santa Cruz and Los Angeles (in the very neighborhood where I’ve lived for the past four years, in fact), with a cult and a hereditary supernatural power woven into the plot. Another Word for Love is similarly the first book I’ve read by its author, but I have a longer history with Wallace’s work; I greatly admired his run as a Care and Feeding columnist at Slate from 2018-2019, and I had the pleasure of meeting him when he was creative nonfiction faculty at the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference last summer.

Writing about these two books together feels right, and also a little confusing.

Time’s Mouth is a family epic that begins when a teenage girl in 1950s Mystic, Connecticut discovers she has the power to reenter her memories—not just to recall them but to actually go back to her past experiences, bodily, and live them again, with the knowledge and wisdom of her present self. She flees her old life as a survivor of abuse to San Francisco—one of the book’s great pleasures is Lepucki’s sure and well-researched portrayal of Californian places and eras, also including 1960s Santa Cruz and Los Angeles’s Fairfax District in the 1980s and 1990s—where she becomes mother to a baby and then a Victorian house of lost women deep in the redwoods, who create a community life around her monthly journeys into her past. Later sections of the novel follow her son and his partner, who escape from the community to create a new life in L.A., and their daughter, whose very Weetzie Bat-adjacent adolescence is interrupted by the realization that she, too, possesses the strange power wielded by the grandmother she has never known.

Another Word for Love is a memoir that is also a kind of handbook for a meaningful life. In a progression of chapters with declarative titles (“The Fog,” “The Smoke,” “The Bread”) Wallace revisits experiences and categories of experience from his past. Collectively, these chapters—many of which are quite short—form a narrative riven with pain, realization, realization, and healing. It is a book not just about grief but of grief, and also one that reckons frankly with the allostatic load that results from a lifetime of suffering and dodging racist violence at every scale. “The End,” a chapter about September 9, 2020, the day that the sky in the Bay Area was orange—a day I experienced on the Mendocino Coast, where the sky was also orange, ten days before my wedding, six months after my mother’s death—is the most exact description of that day and its peculiar terror I’ve read.

It’s a deceptively simple book, in a way that feels major. Its straightforward statements and organization suggest years of deep work. I experienced it as generous and sustaining. Permission-giving and a little provocative—could I, too, write about love in big, expansive ways?

Time’s Mouth felt like a dare, an edifice, daunting and intricate. Densely plotted, propulsive and exact—an obsessively readable book, in which I kept going because I wanted to know what would happen, yes, but also because I saw myself and my taste and my experiences in the world of its characters, an unusual experience for me.

I read both of these books in the week around the anniversary of my mother’s death, February 7, staying up late, holding the words close. They made me cry. They seemed to have something to say to me about memory, about its powerful allure, its ability to transform. A commendation and a warning. Time, memory, loss, retrieval: these days, I keep bursting into tears when I encounter stories of reunion.