In The Momma Puzzle. you share the childhood memories, stories from relatives, and letters that shape your experiences over decades of trying to understand your mother who died by suicide when you were a young girl. What inspired you to share your story with readers?

Ever since my mother died, I knew that I wanted to write a book about her. But I was warned as a child never to talk about her suicide. Through the weight of that secrecy and taboo and repression, I sensed there was an important story there to tell.

I wanted to tell Momma’s story in a way that would allow readers to see her as a human being, not merely as a terrible person, or a bad mother, or some kind of monster.

As a writer, and as her daughter, I was also embarking on a journey, through the process of writing the book, to discover as much as I could about who she had been and why she had to die in the way that she did.

How did your understanding of your mother change as you moved through letters, photographs, and medical records?

Since this is a memoir, the characters are, or were, real people. But for the purposes of writing the book and telling a story, these real people become created characters. I try to stay as close to the truth as possible, though, and use the process of writing to get even closer to the truth—even to create truth along with meaning, which gets at the value of art.

The character of Momma first appears as a young woman in the 1950s—the fresh, young, enthusiastic, adventurous college student who departs for a job in Saigon as a foreign service secretary. Through letters home to her best friend, and to my future father, Momma keenly observes life and politics in Vietnam; later she’s a newlywed, soon with one child, then two (the younger of whom was me); then comes her downward spiral toward suicide.

The character of the narrator (based on myself) is at first full of questions about Momma, and by the end reaches some understanding of who Momma had been, that her struggles were set in motion long before the narrator (I) was conceived.

Did writing the memoir change any of your relationships with surviving family members?

My relationships with my surviving family members have either improved or are stable/ unchanged since writing my memoir.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from your memoir?

I hope readers will take away hope and a greater compassion for people who die by suicide.

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