NEXT TIME YOU COME HOME

A daughter distills her mother’s correspondence into short, reflective entries in this collection.

In 2021, two decades after her mother Milly’s death, Dordal rediscovered 180 letters that her mom had written to her between 1989 and 2001. Intent on preserving the collection, Dordal began typing up the handwritten letters, but soon began “tinkering” with them, stripping away what she felt was unnecessary text. She was drawn to her mother’s observations about the passage of time, the natural world, and grief and loss, and writes that she felt as if she were in collaboration with her parent. The result is a series of “entries” whose forms lie somewhere between letters and poems. Dordal’s relationship with her mother was tested by her parent’s alcoholism; she writes of how she loved her “daytime mother,” but lost her at night to bourbon or vermouth. The entries meld everyday chitchat with profound hopes; in one instance, Milly tells of finishing Kathleen Norris’ 1996 book The Cloister Walk, adding “(I wish I could be that spiritual).” These moments, Dordal writes, helped her to recognize her mother’s “whole-hearted love” and to draw parallels to her own deepening relationship with God after she came out as a lesbian. The entries feature casual cultural and geographical references, as in one dated “August 1991”: “The chemical spill in the Sacramento River sounds terrible. / And now those oil tankers polluting the Olympic Rain Forest.” The distilled letter becomes a breezy verbal collage, displaying the sprezzatura of one of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems(1964). Other entries, such as the one dated “September 1991,” offer poetic fragments of sentiment that subtly denote the warmth of maternal care: “Your packages are in the mail. / I’m sure the cookies will be crumbs, / but they were sent with love.” Further entries carry bluntly moving confessions: “You were 10 when I started drinking, / maybe 9. I’ve put you through a lot of pain.” This touching work effectively approaches universal themes of motherhood, addiction, and illness, among others; readers will even sense the changing of seasons as it progresses.

An intimate and illuminating glimpse into a parent-child relationship.