A Memoir for Remembrance

A shape is composed of its outline and the space inside, meaning that the people around us play an integral role in forming who we are. In navigating the questions left behind following tragic loss, the authors of this poignant memoir panel honor their loved ones through writing, and, in doing so, redefine their own selves along the way. After grieving in silence for years, Susan Lieu, the daughter of refugees from the Vietnam War, finally tells her family’s story in The Manicurist’s Daughter, which details Lieu’s twenty-year journey of piecing together her mother’s life in Vietnam and the truth behind her botched tummy tuck by a surgeon who continued to operate after her death. Abby Reyes, author of Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice, also takes aim at justice when Colombia invites her twenty years too late into Case 001 of their truth and recognition tribunal about the 1999 murder of her partner Terence Unity Freitas near Indigenous land then coveted by a US oil company. For Eirinie Carson, her book The Dead are Gods is a letter to her best friend Larissa and an attempt to make sense of the events leading up to her sudden death. Moderated by librarian and public historian Dorothy Lazard, this discussion will explore the process of documenting long-buried truths that shape us in our grief.