DID I EVER TELL YOU?

A playwright’s emotionally charged debut book about understanding life in the wake of her mother’s death.

When Kingston was 3, her mother was diagnosed with “an aggressive form of breast cancer” that, over the course of a few years, spread to her brain, ultimately killing her. During those intervening years, the author’s mother curated a collection of gifts and messages to mark the birthdays and milestones that would come after her death. Kingston’s memoir is the story of her childhood—one defined by the ever-present expectation of and planning for death—and time’s insistent march through her adolescence and young adulthood, punctuated with disappointments, depressions, and tragedies. It is also the story of her mother, a narrative that includes revelations, some startling, about her own childhood, accomplishments, and marriage and insights into how she apportioned availability, presence, and guidance to her daughter posthumously. As these threads intertwine, otherwise minor memories, such as a childhood sleepover, become saturated with significance, and the emotional sensations of a child are overlaid with the wisdom and reflection of someone much older. For readers, this striation proves both enriching and disorienting, mirroring a touch-and-go intermittency of illness and the inevitability of her mother’s death. Instead of an adult’s analysis of the impact of spending her formative years under the yoke of a parent’s impending death, the author yearns for the past, situating many of the text’s most profound insights with her child self. Thus, Kingston’s story captures the distinct way that a child experiences grief, even anticipatory grief, and the struggle of a child’s mind to envision a future without a parent. As the shape of her grief changes with age, Kingston teaches us something essential about how to collect, hold, and savor memories of loved ones over a lifetime.

A heart-tugging memoir about the many faces of loss.