Have you read my book yet? My new memoir My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family Fractured Past is officially out in the world. I hope you’ll grab a copy. It’s gotten starred reviews from Booklist and Kirkus (“deeply researched, lyrically written… trenchant and moving… powerful”). It was also selected for Amazon Editors’ Best Books of 2026 and as one of Publishers Weekly’s most-anticipated memoirs. New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Traister says, “What a beautiful, immersive book… I cried!” Kate Manne calls it “the tour de force of a memoir you need to read this year.”
I went hiking with my dog the other morning in the regional park near my house. I climbed a big hill and looked out across a sweeping vista of sun-baked hills and valleys bursting with green trees. I crouched down to pick up one of the dandelion seeds blanketing the side of the trail and took a video of it against the blue sky, rotating it this way and that before releasing it to the wind, which swept it away like an eraser on a chalkboard. An older man with hiking poles walked by with his wife. “Find something interesting?” he asked, pausing, as she walked ahead. I stood up so quick that my vision briefly darkened, feeling embarrassed to be immersed in a dandelion seed. “Ah, those tiny flowers,” he assumed, nodding to the ones just beyond the preponderance of seeds. “Yes,” I lied. “There is much to regard out here,” he said. “Yep,” I said, realizing that this was a man who could appreciate a dandelion seed. “You zoom in on one small corner and you could lose an hour contemplating it.” He walked on and I stood there watching tall dried bobbing grasses and listening to the chorus of crickets, so curiously layered and ambient. There could have been five of them or three-hundred. Crickets always bring me back to sleep-away summer camp—not a distinct isolated memory but the collage of it. The bodily feeling of being an adolescent in nature, surrounded by other girls, and without my parents. There was this farm camp where we milked goats. I remember the greasy feel of the utters pinched between my sliding fingers, the satisfying spray of the milk against the sides of the metal bucket. We braided garlic, too, weaving the hard flaking stems together—not unlike how we rhythmically crossed over segments of each other’s soft hair, sitting cross-legged on our bunk beds. My tanned legs were covered in soft hairs made golden by the sun. I wasn’t thinking about the boys at camp, even though I’d already started writing in messy cursive in my pink Hello Kitty notebook about my crush as school. Mostly, I thought about missing home, but then I would have these moments of belonging in nature that for a flicker of a moment gave me a sense of a bigger home. A camp counselor took a group of us up to the top of a hill and told us to sit alone and draw what we saw. For the first time that week, the roiling in my stomach that I called “home sickness” went away. I felt that way, too, in the river, turning this way and that, imagining myself as a mermaid, feeling invigorated by the cold and the pleasure of my floating, twisting body. I often think about these camp memories as being from the “before times.” Before puberty and the further encroachment of a heteronormative girl-hating culture (that was also supposedly all about “girl power”). The before where my entire being seemed to thrum with creative possibility—big possibility. Big desire. Bigger than boys. Bigger than my parents. At-home-in-the-universe big. I was thinking about all of this on my hike with my dog the other day. The crickets were my gateway, as they often have been in adulthood. The gateway has been different these past several years. I’ve felt returned in some ways to that big possibility—through the radicalization of pregnancy and parenthood, the slide into official middle age, the puncturing of countless myths and illusions, and a growing sense of mainstream cultural irrelevance. A relief, all of it. I find myself swimming in cold water again and standing on hilltops taking note of what I can see. So, the crickets feel less like a flash of a distant memory than the beat of another comma in the same long sentence. There is a recurring scene lately. C. and I will be watching some reality-TV dating show with my computer balanced on one of our laps. On-screen some people two decades younger than us will be playing a game that involves whipped cream, kissing, blindfolds, or some such. Often there is a game, dare, or challenge involved, one that is utterly reminiscent of the TV I grew up on in the 90s. And I will say something like: “This is what I thought adult life was going to be like.” Or: “I really believed I would be called upon to tie a cherry stem with my tongue one day.” That was part of what came for me in the post-camp era. Ostensibly, it was these ideas about sex, desirability, and pleasure, but boiled down to their deepest essence, they were really ideas about what it took to find safety, belonging, and a sense of home in this world. These days, I am more likely to turn to my stack of books on Zen and Buddhism than reality-TV for such guidance. My ideas about sex, desirability, and pleasure have changed, too, although that cherry-stem self is never too far away. Nor is that big adolescent thrumming. At the end of my hike, I picked a stem of purple sweet pea—an orchid-like outer bloom with a rounded nub of a hooded bud in the center. I placed it in a tiny vase and held it up for C. “Remind you of anything,” I said, playful, obvious, and insistent on wonder.
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