A groundbreaking collage of epistles, mementos, poetry, and literary criticism ... In defining language as the nucleus for experience, Chang's innovative montage brings to mind Jorge Luis Borges' 'The Aleph'...where time and memory are converged as omniscient reality. While structurally complex, Dear Memory articulates grief's basic anxieties ... Chang's poignant anecdotes on motherhood, from her own experience and others', can be read as tangible ways to illustrate memory's paradoxes ... Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem.
These letters—addressed to unnamed family members, educators, friends, even to silence—may appear to be one-way communications, but the reader is carbon copied as confidant and silent recipient, enjoined to consider her own experiences of memory and loss ... these essays aren’t simply about grief. They are also an attempt to reframe one’s narrative—creating a bespoke suit of what one knows, doesn’t know, and can never know ... These letters to the past that are paving stones to the future is the verdant ground that Victoria Chang explores in these, dare I say, memorable essays.
She applies a poet’s sensibility and an artistic eye to the details of her personal history in her memoir ... Though Chang’s memoir is written in letters, attaching itself to a plot with only the most delicate threads, what emerges is a picture of a woman searching for a way to use words and tangible forms to observe and reshape the world. The development of Chang’s literary philosophy is as important to her as how she views her parents or her memories of past relationships. Dear Memory is ontology as much as it is ontogeny. Each letter is composed of imagery, remembrances, and poetic aphorisms. Together the letters form a literary collage ... At times the mood of Chang’s work is distant or cold, yet it becomes clear that the author is acutely aware of this and of perception’s role when it comes to language ... Dear Memory relies on a vocabulary of poetic devices for its most resonant passages. Chang uses image, metaphor, and pithy reflection in these short paragraphs to give the reader mental pictures— or shapes—of the ineffable things she describes. Her syntax shows an awareness of the power of repetition or refrain. This fluid style allows the reader to envision the very specific nature of Chang’s anguish. Each sentence unspools elegantly into the next in text that is deceptively simple ... By accompanying her letters with visual collages overlaid with handwritten poetry, she suggests that the act of creating visual and literary forms is equally transformative for reader and creator alike.
