Natalie C. Forshaw
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:46:37 PDT

If I Were to Ask My Mother is a collection of personal essays that focuses on the narrator’s attempt to recreate her past through exploring childhood memories and entries of family diaries and other artifacts. In the first essay, the narrator’s childhood diaries are destroyed by her mother, an act seen by the adult narrator as an attempt by the mother to silence her daughter’s voice. The difficult mother/daughter relationship is a theme in the remaining essays as the narrator attempts to recreate the destroyed past by exploring her childhood memories. Diary entries are included in many of the essays in an attempt to compare memories with the stories found in the family diaries. Missing diary entries encourage the narrator to interpret the silences by speculating what might have been written. Sometimes, as the narrator discovers, the artifacts themselves hide the past’s truths.