Dorothea Lasky’s new essay collection questions how we ought to remember ourselves
MEMORY
by Dorothea Lasky
Semiotext(e), 264 pp., $24.95 (paper)
What are we to do with our juvenilia? At some time in our lives—and for those students nearing their graduation, its first glimpses are showing—we must ask ourselves this question. We eventually confront ourselves in a double take and decide what is to be done with that history of ourselves we cannot disavow but neither wish to embrace. What are we to do with our youthful ways, our pent-up angst, our old moral dilemmas and institutional woe, and most of all our naïveté. All in all, the question we confront is interminable but basic: who were we yesterday and who today?
Dorothea Lasky’s new book, MEMORY (2025), is a memoiristic collection of essays that deal with these questions of remembrance. Those interminable but basic questions plague her as she looks back on her history. She reflects on a history both of herself and her heritage, though she finds the two—quite rightly—inextricable. Her reflections are seldom univocal, incorporating the perspectives of those who have faded through her life, and neither linear but instead fragmentary, exemplary of the memories she tackles. Essays jump rather unthematically and sometimes recall each other as faded allusions. Each essay holds the opportunity to remember the book being read from within it.
The most exceptional of Lasky’s reflections deal with the remembrance of her fragmented identity. Particularly, her essays concerning her parents and her Jewish identity are most passionate.
In a furtive reminiscence of her mother, Lasky harkens back to Covid-19 when she pays her a visit. After buying some groceries, Lasky quickly hurries into her at-risk mother’s home to drop off the groceries and leave for her mother’s safety. Lasky’s met with her mother’s sneer of “You’ve ruined me!” Lasky separated her mother from the remainder of their family during the pandemic for her safety; and for this traumatic alienation, she was incapable of forgiving Lasky.
As Lasky remarks, “Her words cut into me,” leading her into a reflection of the pains of motherhood and “female anger personified” by the colour blue. Out of this personified raging blue she identifies the blues and greens of David Hockney’s paintings, whose work Lasky was introduced to by her artist mother: “An uncanny valley of all the impressions of what an ocean might be. What might have been. What maybe it still can be.” The tumultuousness of motherhood brings with it a debt, both owed to a mother’s children and to her ancestry: to be a mother who ruptures a heritage of failed parentage and who owes her life to the inalienability of her children—even if her children alienate her.
On remembering her Jewishness, Lasky reflects on her concomitant conspiracy theorism as she recounts her intimate relationship with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Perhaps an initially strange combination—Judaism and conspiracy theory—she finds in both an unflinching questioning of power. In the former, one of ancestral trauma that calls for a remembrance of questioning authority and the possibility for its processes to become derelict. In the latter, the manifestation of questioning authority through a raised eyebrow at the interpretive totalisation perpetuated by dominant systems of knowledge. (Even if it manifests in Lasky’s rather questionable commitments to conspiracy theory, especially the possibility of The Shining being an apologia for filming a faked moon landing.)
Lasky’s essays stretch quite far in their breadth and approach exceptional themata for memoiristic reflection; though the essays beyond these two flounder in such a way that we might question how obliged we feel to retain them in our memory. Indeed, we might not feel obliged at all.
While Lasky’s approaches are fascinating (if not interpretively questionable—though that’s presumably the point), they land as only half formed. The general outline of her essays’ contents arrives with a unique angle, but the execution often arrives incomplete. As Lasky reaches for an interesting thought, her writing falls flat, collapsing back into a repetitive unpolished formal style. Though form and style can be the most exceptional aspect of an author’s corpus—as Lasky herself claims in an essay on Iris Apfel—they don’t convey anything substantial when there isn’t anything substantially formed to convey. Content can save a rather half-baked form; but form, unfortunately, cannot do the inverse.
Reading Lasky’s essays undoubtedly suggests important questions of oneself and the fragmentation of remembering one’s identity. But when prose like “Real poetry is a party, a wild party” is a mature formulation, we may come to conclude that we never get past our juvenile ways. And sometimes it’s best to let that juvenilia remain past, leaving it to be gradually forgotten as something embarrassing though occasionally nostalgic. Yet nostalgic in a way that it needn’t be repeated.