Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief

Review Praise for Dear Memory"[Dear Memory] is an open-ended inquiry not of a bounded life but of an ongoing present, full of longing and imperfection . . . Chang has followed language to the edge of what she knows; the question her book asks is whether language can go further still . . . Her own project is not to erase those incisions—or even, as a child might hope, to heal them—but to retrace and redescribe them. If there are wounds in the past, she seeks to live with them as scars." —New Yorker"Groundbreaking . . . Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem." —Thúy Dinh, NPR"Chang's work is excavation, a digging through the muck of society for an existential clarity, a cultural clarity and a general clarity of self." —New York Times Book Review"Both a chronicling of [Chang's] family's history and a powerful, stirring rumination on ancestry, inherited trauma and home." —TIME Magazine, "Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2021""[Dear Memory is] a collage of fragments constituting a moving portrait of the poet herself." —Los Angeles Times, "Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2021""Dear Memory is the work of a gifted poet, a wordsmith who is conscious that absent a chance to be an eyewitness to the past, we are left to spin our own webs of emotional significance and nostalgia." —Lorraine Berry, Minneapolis Star Tribune"After the impressive formal innovations of her 2020 book, OBIT, which won multiple national awards, Chang continues to find new ways to plumb her experiences on the page . . . Depending on what one brings to this book, each reader may find their own moment of goosebumps or tears . . . This book is moving in a way that transcends story and message; it captures a pure sense of another person's heart." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
"Chang has assembled a collection of letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as well as family memorabilia, creating not just a moving family history but a rumination on the creative and self-shaping act of remembering." —Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2021"
"A moving consideration of ancestry and loss . . . [Chang's] prose is sharp and strong—memory is the 'exit wound of joy,' she writes—and her creativity shines in her incorporation of the collage-like visual elements, which add depth. Fans of Chang's poetry will be delighted." —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"Ever inventive, ever searching, Chang bends genres to approach an unmanageable emotion." —Observer"These letters to the past that are paving stones to the future is the verdant ground that Victoria Chang explores in these, dare I say, memorable essays." —Colorado Review“Victoria Chang's Dear Memory is a tender exploration of grief, an excavation into stories untold, memories unshared, the treasures that await our discoveries if we trace through the lives that held ours. It is a vulnerable and evocative experience of what it means to miss, to yearn, to return to the pieces of our most beloved." —Kao Kalia Yang
"Those who were fans of Chang's previous book, Obit, will find some similar (yet still refreshing) innovations of style and feeling in Dear Memory. In this genre-bending and deeply personal work, Chang manipulates the loose form of letter-writing to build an archive of emotion out of an archive of familial history. This collection takes seriously the literary value of non-traditional literary elements such as collage-making, snippets of memorabilia, drawings in journals, and bureaucratic debris. This work emphasizes that alongside her masterful and vulnerable writing, these are, in fact, the bits and pieces which have most tangibly shaped our history and experience. Her boundary-pushing exploration of herself is moving and intimate on levels beyond expectation. Dear Memory marks an important step in the evolution of Chang's work, and I look forward to seeing its impact unfold in the litera