While trying to juggle her own life and work in the first decade of the millennium, Kadetsky was also struggling to care for her mother—a former Pucci and runway model in the deep throes of late-stage Alzheimer’s—fight with Medicare, and deal with her sister Jill—who was bouncing in and out of New York rehab and homeless centers and barely able to assist in the care of their mother. At the same time, Kadetsky was reconnecting with her French-Canadian family, trying to “inhabit my mother’s past in order to resolve” these decades of trauma and family secrets.
In connected essays, THE MEMORY EATERS uses nostalgia and Kadetsky’s personal Jewish and French-Canadian family background to explore epigenetics, grief, what a name and an identity mean in the context of family and inheritance, her own traumatic assault, yoga, Buddhism, and more.
https://elizabethkadetsky.com/the-memory-eaters/