Book Content Warnings: Alcohol Addiction, Death, Depression, Domestic Violence, Drug Addiction, Suicide
“My mother lived entire lives apart from mine.”
— Danielle Geller, “Dog Flowers”
Dog Flowers is author Danielle Geller’s memoir, punctuated with archive-style photographs and diary excerpts that she inherited after her mother, Laureen, passed away in 2013. Geller describes her experiences growing up in South Florida as well as her college and adult life in Pennsylvania. The pictures and excerpts demonstrate her mother’s absence, telling stories from the time of Geller’s childhood that rarely seem to involve Geller herself.
Laureen was an alcoholic mother, mostly absent from her daughter’s life, in contrast to Geller’s father, Michael. He struggled similarly with alcohol abuse, but returned to Geller between short-term internments in rehabs, prisons, and shelters. Consequently, herself and her younger sister Eileen, who also struggles with substance abuse, were mostly raised by their paternal grandmother. In the early pages of her memoir, Geller writes: “I am not trying to learn how to grieve my mother; I have been grieving her absence my entire life.”
The memoir is not particularly chronological. It begins with the recent memory of her mother’s death, but Geller’s contemporary grief is interpolated with facts about her mother’s early life as well as parables from her own childhood. It also details Geller’s pilgrimage to the Navajo Nation for Laureen’s funeral, which coincided with the first time that Geller meets her mother’s family. The nascent familial ‘connection’ is tenuous and uncomfortable — laden with the weight of addiction, the renewed heartbreak of abandonment, and the space of difficult years and unshared geography.
The nascent familial ‘connection’ is tenuous and uncomfortable — laden with the weight of addiction, the renewed heartbreak of abandonment, and the space of difficult years and unshared geography.
The author is an archivist by trade, but her background in the field is rendered personal as well as professional in this memoir-archive. This can be seen in the inherently personal material she is curating, such as her mother’s journal entries and photographs — many of which center around or reference Geller herself. The incorporation of “archive” into her memoir serves as antidote to the focus on Geller’s family: through it, the author herself is not overshadowed by the people who begot her.
Geller describes herself early in her memoir as believing that she was “a failure of an archivist,” but the memoir itself is a testament against her once-burgeoning belief. She describes archival materials she has previously worked with as having “resisted meaningful arrangement or description.” However, “resisting meaning” is the last possible description readers would apply to this memoir.
Seeped in her archival and personal reflections, the material Geller works with in this novel feels intentional yet organic. An intricate life, laden with all of its relational off-ramps and delicate emotional networks, has been organized into this memoir but remains fundamentally intact — raw — in a way that only an archivist could manage. It is like an architecturally advanced building that appears to onlookers to defy gravity, doing so not by magic but by the hands of skilled engineers. Despite Geller’s use of her mother’s ephemera to structure the memoir, the author preserves agency over her own story.
It is like an architecturally advanced building that appears to onlookers to defy gravity, doing so not by magic but by the hands of skilled engineers.
Geller incorporates her mother’s diary entries using footnotes. The connection between the sentence and the diary quote attached via footnote is not often clear. Subsequently, the reader is forced to grapple with Laureen’s narration of her experiences and Geller’s description of the past — all while synthesizing the connection themselves lest they desire to move on without understanding.
The space created with this subtle technique verges on miraculous: a form of self-protection for the author. It shields some of the most poignant, intimate moments of her memoir from readers who might possibly fail to recognize the extremely tender nature of the book’s content — especially one so rife with real trauma and abuse. By abstracting the connections between her analysis and her evidence, Geller avoids baring her soul to readers who are not willing to engage with her book on the same level as herself.
This memoir is meaningful not because it is sad or by virtue of the author’s birth into a family of addicts. Her book is meaningful because Danielle Geller presents an honest and intentionally narrativized rendition of her family life that readers cannot help but behold. Dog Flowers’ intertwining of creative nonfiction and archival methods results in a work that is uniquely thoughtful and unyielding.
DANIELLE GELLER is a writer of personal essays and memoir. Her first book, Dog Flowers, was published by One World/Penguin Random House in 2021. She received her MFA in creative writing for nonfiction at the University of Arizona, and a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award in 2016. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Brevity, and Arizona Highways, and has been anthologized in This Is the Place. She lives with her husband and two cats in British Columbia, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria. She is also a faculty mentor for the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is a member of the Navajo Nation: born to the Tsi’naajinii, born for the white man.
Dog Flowers can be purchased here.
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