Dog Flowers

November 9, 2020
In this stirring debut memoir, Geller uses her late mother’s ephemera to recollect her own fractured childhood and reconstructs her mother’s life. Geller’s mother, Laureen “Tweety” Lee, was homeless for the last six months of her life. She’d struggled with alcoholism and was unconscious when Geller paid her a final hospital visit. Eight suitcases held by a grieving “on-again, off-again lover” contained all of Laureen’s possessions. From these, Geller assembled a paper trail of diaries, photos, and letters that traced Laureen’s departure from a Navajo reservation at age 19, the series of low-skill odd jobs she worked, her marriage to a narcissistic man who “loved the sound of his own name,” and her becoming a mother at 22. Geller, raised outside of the poverty of reservation life and the only one in her family to make it into the middle class, returned to the reservation to reconnect with family members and learn about her mother’s past. The author’s accounts of her family members’ struggles with addiction are heartbreaking (“I couldn’t understand why she chose to drink, when drinking had already cost us so much,” Geller writes of her sister), and the narrative is punctuated with haunting photographs and her own childhood drawings. This beautiful memoir is not to be missed.

December 1, 2020

Gellar (creative writing, Univ. of Victoria) vividly recounts her experience coming to terms with her mother's life. After not speaking to her mother for six months, Gellar is called when her mother, nicknamed "Tweety," is in a coma after withdrawing from alcohol. Tweety was an irregular presence throughout Gellar's life, and she and her sister were primarily raised by her grandmother. After Tweety's death, Geller receives her possessions and uses her training as an archivist to document and piece together her mother's life. Gellar attends a memorial service held at the Navajo reservation where Tweety grew up; by meeting extended family and sorting through her possessions, Gellar begins to form a more complete picture of her mother. Weaving stories from her childhood as well as from the present, Gellar describes in rich detail a family life filled with patterns of neglect, abuse, and mental illness mixed with moments of joy and humor. With instability as a constant in her life, it's uplifting to see how Gellar manages to find her own voice and is able to share her story with clarity and heart. VERDICT An introspective reflection on the complexities of family relationships that will engage fans of memoirs.--Anitra Gates, Erie Cty. P.L., PA

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Starred review from December 1, 2020
A riveting and searching memoir, award-winning Geller's first book is her artful attempt to piece together her late mother's life as she herself comes of age and into her own destiny as a writer. Among the few possessions her mother left behind, Geller, who has a background in library science, finds diaries, letters, calendars, and photos that fill in the narrative of a woman who struggled with alcoholism and was largely absent from the author's life. Sharing many of these artifacts here, tagged with titles, dates, and descriptions, Geller writes, ""I am tempted to erase the questions and unknowns from my mother's life--to simplify the arrangement--but what kind of archivist would I be?"" Simultaneously, in evocative passages that contain both the child she once was and the writer she will become, Geller recalls growing up with her younger sister, mostly in their grandmother's care while their father also battled addiction. She studies, graduates, makes her own way. She returns to her mother's Navajo reservation homeland and communes with grandmothers, aunts, and cousins in memorializing her. With both harrowing episodes and moments of beauty to linger in, Geller's finely crafted work of extraordinary strength and survival spans worlds, encompassing life and after-life.

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Starred review from October 15, 2020
A Navajo woman's memoir of family, loss, and self-discovery. Geller, a creative writing teacher, takes readers on two parallel journeys: that of her mother, Laureen, who left the Navajo reservation at age 19, "almost as soon as she could," and her own, which begins with her notifying her sister Eileen that their mother was dying. Laureen had spent "the last six months of her life homeless, sleeping in a park in Lake Worth, Florida," and the author traveled to visit her during her final days. After Laureen's death, Geller collected her mother's belongings, "packed into eight suitcases" and including "her diaries, her photos, and the letters she kept." Using these personal items, the author expertly weaves her story into Laureen's, comparing her memories with her mother's records. Geller traces her childhood, adoption by her grandmother, experiences with abuse, and troubled relationships with her sister and father. One of the primary themes here is the author's complicated feelings about her Navajo identity, whether discussing how she "learned to twist my sorrow into a joke," describing her family to her friends, or recounting her meeting with a Navajo jewelry maker. "I didn't imagine she knew my mother's family; I didn't even imagine she cared," writes Geller. "But I had reached the limits of my documentary sleuthing--the letters from my mother's fam-ily were old, the addresses and phone numbers ancient--and this jeweler seemed like my last chance." After that encounter, she was invited to a memorial for her mother on the reservation and began the process of connecting with her extended family and working to understand her own cultural identity. Geller's mix of archival research and personal memoir allows readers to see a refreshing variety of perspectives and layers, resulting in an eye-opening, moving narrative. A deftly rendered, powerful story of family, grief, and the search for self.

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