Mom's Records

Writing, 2017-Present

After my mom died in 2016, I had to decide what to do for an obituary. I wrote a lengthy one for the Detroit Free Press, but then called them up and found out how insanely expensive it is to get anything except a blurb. I didn’t feel like cutting the obituary down, so I decided to go a different route, one my mom would’ve appreciated more anyway: a writing project called Mom’s Records. The idea was to take something I enjoyed with my mom — her collection of records from the sixties — and use each one as a prompt to reflect on my mom’s life and my life with her. It’s been a generative project, and the most emotionally open thing I’ve ever done.