Say Mother Say Hand: An Anti-Memoir

Say Mother Say Hand begins in the wake of an attempted suicide. Nestled somewhere on the spectrum between memoir and dreamscape, the narrator rummages through her maternal lineage and unravels the threads of intergenerational trauma–of the Holocaust, of mental illness, addiction, suicide, what it means to bear witness to what she cannot heal. As these threads spiral into a reckoning with inheritance, the narrator dreams open the unfindable parts. In this stunning debut, Marie Conlan interrogates what is inherited through the body, what connects a lineage, and what is destined to come next in the brutal and uncertain now.