My Dead Parents

Children rarely know their parents as complete human beings. When writer Anya Yurchyshyn and her sister were little girls, their parents were exciting people with brilliant careers. Their house was crammed with exotic objects they collected on their world travels. But as parents, they were distant, self-dramatizing and verbally abusive. She thought they had never been happy.

Her Ukrainian-born father died in a car accident in Ukraine when Yurchyshyn was 13. At the time, she felt only relief, as she did again when, years later, her mother died of alcoholism. But when she began dredging out her childhood home, she found a bundle of her parents' love letters to each other. Those letters were her first clue that they had at one time been happy together, passionate and hopeful. "I wanted to wave their letters in their faces and say, 'Hey, what the hell is this? And what the hell happened to you?' "

By dividing her book into two sections, Yurchyshyn allows her readers to experience her bewildering discoveries much as she did. The first tells the story of her harrowing, chaotic childhood. The second tells what she learned about her parents after their deaths, from their papers, from people who knew them and from her investigation into her father's death. What she learns does not erase her experiences, but it brings up better memories, of times they were fun and generous, and allows her to accept them, love them and grieve. --Sara Catterall

Powered by: Xtenit