The Wrong Son : A memoir

What constitutes personhood and consciousness? What memories get lost, and why? Dorothea Lasky’s Memory is a cycle of poet’s essays ranging across three dimensions of memory – ancestral, personal and poetic – to reflect on art; time, both everyday and the transcendent; charged sites of collective reminiscence, such as the moon landing; and forgetting through her father’s experience of Alzheimer’s. Lasky broaches the edges of knowability: what’s left where memory is absent? What’s ‘real’ beyond the horizon of death? The book closes with ‘Time, the Rose, and the Moon’, an ars poetica exploring the ouroboros as a symbol for the nonlinear processes of time, memory and art. Lasky reveals memory to be huge and haunting, as she accumulates impressions that challenge the possibility of fixed meaning.