Memory as a Choice

Through the narrator's direct address epistolary narrative to his mother, the author explores the ways in which the individual must choose his relationship with his memories, how he will perceive and interpret them, and ultimately how they will shape him. As a 28-year-old man, the narrator reflects back on his childhood, his mother, grandmother, grandfather, father, and first love in an attempt to communicate to his mother what he has been unable. While almost the entirety of the novel exists as a compilation of recollections, the narrator's relationship with the act of remembering does not remain the same.

In the early sections of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, he rather appears plagued by his memories of his mother, most of them featuring her confusing abuse and violence towards him. Memory in the narrator's beginning passages of his letter is not a choice; the...