Victoria Chang, _Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief_

 THE WORD "UNIQUE" gets overused, but it may truly apply here. At least, I can't think of another book much like it. It's a kind of epistolary memoir. It covers Chang's childhood family, her education, her career as a writer, and her becoming a parent herself, but all through letters she has addressed to people who have been a part of her life--not preserved letters, I need to note, but letters expressly written from here and now that recall and weigh vivid moments in Chang's relationship with the addressee. 

There are letters to her parents, of course, figures already well known to readers of Chang's poetry, but also letters to grandparents (some of whom she never met), to teachers, to classmates, to other writers, to her children.

(But not to her husband, or ex-husband, as the case may be. I noticed and wondered about this. It seems that this person would be important, if only as father of the children. Maybe they struck a deal that she never gets mentioned in her writing?)

The peculiar intimacy of the letters combined with their being written for  the sake of this book creates a movement back and forth over the private/public divide, the reader being admitted to something profoundly personal, without the reader's ever being explicitly addressed. 

And what to make of the circumstance that the addressees perhaps will never read these letters? Several are dead, for one thing, and the classmate who taunted her during a run in PE class (an incident that also shows up in Love, Love) may not even know that Chang ever became a writer, much less that his adolescent cruelty has now become part of contemporary literature (twice).

Insofar as Chang has already written searchingly of her parents, their origins in China, their struggle to adapt to and make a success of life in  the United States, and their illnesses, a lot of the book covers familiar ground, but Chang changes things up by adding a visual element: family documents and photos that have been turned into support for writing, poems in some cases, transcriptions from an interview with her mother in others. 

Chang's other books do not, however, have nearly as much reflection on being a writer as this one does, in its letters to mentors, would-be mentors, disappointing mentors, fellow workshop students, and writing comrades. Some of these folks come off not much better than the taunting middle school bully. No names are given, but in a few instances guesses may be made.