As she lay dying from what seems to be the scourge of the female side of the family line—breast cancer—the author’s mother, the author’s mother reveals what has heretofore been a well-kept secret: as part of her legacy, she is leaving the younger woman her collection of journals. The location of this treasure trove, however, is a secret that is dependent upon the daughter’s first agreeing to one single condition: that she not look at them until after the mother has finally succumbed to her dreaded disease and passed into afterlife.
A promise made is a promise kept. But what awaits the now semi-orphaned daughter is not at all what she expects. True to her word, the journals are exactly where the mother has indicated they would be found. A mother after this passage, she finally works up whatever emotions are required to follow through and become a voyeur into her mother’s most private thoughts. The totality of the journal collection is the first shock: three shelves filled with clothbound journals. The surprise offered by the exterior is nothing compared to what awaits the author when she opens her mother’s journals.
Empty books. Each and every one of the journals are filled with nothing but blank pages where nothing has been entered, nothing has been scratched, and nothing has been ripped free from the binding. The legacy of the mother passed down to the daughter after death is an opportunity of sublime imagination and creativity: it will be up to the daughter to fill in those pages.
What follows is exactly that process. The author begins her book at age fifty-four, the exact same age her mother was when she died. The narrative proceeds to roll back time to hit on the highlights of those fifty-four years through a series of fifty-four short essays that touch upon a variety of memories, moments, events, and recollections that pay a daughter’s tribute to a mother and reveal a mother’s influence over the transformation of a daughter from child to adult. One of the most important aspects of the journaling process is revealed in Entry V when the author—a renowned conservationist and author in her own right—decides that she will be using a pencil to write entries into her mother’s journals. A pencil allows the flexibility of erasure which allows connects contextually to the historical shame that so much of woman has been accomplished by women has been erased by the pen of history; ink is an illusion of permanence whereas a pencil addresses the reality without deception.
The book is comprised of a series of recollections that mingle memories with philosophical contemplation. Along the way, the reader is introduced to the author’s father who is portrayed as an action hero sprung to life for whom telling a great story was everything. Childhood memories paint her mother as patient but determined to teach her daughter the value of self-sufficiency. Allusions and references to artists, musicians, social activists, religious icons, and a wide variety of wildlife encounters all serve to illuminate the lives of both women: that which has been lived by both as well as that still yet to be explored by the daughter.
