Crushed Azaleas gathers fragments of an international childhood into an intimate memoir about belonging, family wounds, cultural identity, music, and learning to understand the people who shaped us. The memoir unfolds through self-contained memories rather than a strictly chronological narrative. Why did that structure feel right for your story?

I chose the form of self-contained memories, or vignette-like scenes (as I refer to them in my introduction) because it was the only way to convey the beauty and power of each memory, and also the absence of a unifying theme linking these memories into a coherent whole. Longer chapters like “Roman New Year’s” and “A Monsoon Tale” present somewhat of a contrast because they portray entire worlds where festive and colorful surroundings take center stage.

Music appears throughout the memoir as an important emotional language. What has music allowed you to express or understand that words sometimes cannot?

Any answer to this question will be incomplete because you are asking me to describe a place beyond words. Toward the end of my chapter titled “Seeking a Spiritual Path,” I describe what listening to music does for me. It creates a sanctuary, a space beyond time where love received is perceived as light, a place of mystery, a home for my soul.

What was most difficult about writing honestly about people you loved while also acknowledging the pain within those relationships?

Writing this memoir has been like peeling the layers of an onion. Each layer has brought pain with it, and also a deeper insight. It has been an inward journey. Early on I decided to bare my soul to the reader and to show the beauty and pain inherent in loving relationships. In family, we are at our most loving and most vulnerable. I found resonance and affirmation in reading Thomas Moore’s “Care of the Soul” where he states “Family is a sometimes comforting, sometimes devastating, house of memory.”

After spending so much of the memoir searching for belonging, where do you believe our deepest sense of home ultimately comes from? 

In answer to this question, I would like to quote a concept from Zen practice called “turning one’s light around.” It teaches that one’s true light (wisdom) isn’t waiting at the end of a long journey, it has been always at one’s own doorstep (within) if one simply stops looking outward. I lean towards this inward journey at the end of my first chapter titled Origins: “Maybe the way back home is to find the most intimate part of me, a part stretched thin by memory. A part that is beautiful, mysterious, and fragile, sustained by a love of dreams and origins.”

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