Memory

Throughout the novel, the author uses Antara's attempts to understand Tara's deteriorating mental state to explore the relationship between memory and identity. In the narrative present, Antara's adult self has trouble reconciling who her mother was in the past with who she seems to be becoming. Indeed, she blames Tara's unreliability as a mother throughout her childhood for her own sense of detachment and confusion. Tara's failing memory coincides with Antara's resistance to remember her own past. The author enacts this dynamic through the narrative structure.

At the start of the novel, Antara's narrative lives almost entirely in the present. As the story unfolds, however, Antara increasingly looks to the past for meaning, purpose, and truth. Like her mother's life, Antara's history also cannot "be found in old photo albums" (46). Because she does not possess pictographic evidence of her own experiences, and because her mother supposedly...