My Mother's Erasure

For fans of Alexandra Fuller’s Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, a daughter’s story of watching her mother’s itinerant and international life descend into addiction—and her own journey to recognize that she is powerless to save her.

In this emotional memoir, Joya Taft-Dick retraces her mother’s life—from a childhood rooted in an idyllic Vermont town through her years as an “expat” and a “trailing spouse” as the family moves from one country to the next. While Joya’s father’s United Nations job moves them from places like Liberia to Chad to Sri Lanka, putting them in the way of challenges like evacuations, tsunamis, and Scorpion Season, her mother increasingly relies on alcohol to numb her deepening disconnection and loss of agency.

Joya discovers evidence of wounding early on, and then watches as the tiny cracks they formed widen over time, exacerbated by a seemingly glamorous lifestyle and the learned ability to bury pain in resolute silence. In this uncovering of her mother’s story, Joya finally unearths compassion and love—not just for the entirety of who her mother once was but also for the hypervigilant child she herself was forced to be, and the woman she has since become.