Legacy, a memoir, is currently out to literary agents.
Legacy is the book I’ve been circling for most of my life. It began as an attempt to understand my mother — a refugee who fled Nazi-occupied Poland — and became a larger inquiry into the stories families invent to survive. Reinventions held her life together, omissions and outright fabrications, many of which I inherited without realising it.
The book blends memoir, history and psychology to explore how deception can be both a weapon and a shelter, how myth-making seeps into everyday life, and what happens when those inherited stories start to crack.
Legacy is, at heart, a conversation between mother and daughter across time. In writing it, I found that the past doesn’t disappear, but recalibrates, settling into the quiet spaces of a life until we finally turn and face it.
Some excerpts to give a sense of my writing style and the worlds I’m building in Legacy.
Within the short time that it took for me to open the suitcase and take out the first folder, you became a stranger wearing my mother’s face.
In 1939, the citizens of Bayonne were plump and assured… But just one year later, their once complacent streets trembled with the chaos of desperate refugees and the rumble and stench of overheated cars. I imagined you among them, your small hand held tightly by the only people you knew but who seemed to know nothing. I stared at the tourists sipping and nibbling in pavement cafés, oblivious to the past. I saw you standing with Médard and Sylvia, waiting for the moment when the man finally shouted the name — “Schramm!”
Whether I like it or not, I am, in some ways, your reflection. I have inherited your restlessness, your conviction that the next place, the next reinvention, will finally be the right one. I carry your impetuosity, your impatience, your talent for undoing what might have been your best work. I know, too, the weight of buried emotions, unmapped and treacherous. I wonder if, in acknowledging them, they will own me and if this is what you feared as well.
But in all this questioning, I now see how I have followed your trace only to arrive full circle, standing at the point where I can finally dare to feel and accept what comes of it. And who should I thank for that? You? Or Dad, the man who stood by, let you do what you did, and then died believing that the contents of a suitcase might somehow undo what he should have stopped long before? Even after your death, your darkness remained as a whispering malevolence crouched like a rat on my shoulder. Exorcising it became my mission.