Memory Care traces a daughter’s relentless search for a version of her family that she can bear to remember. Jennifer C. Nash travels across the nation in a quest to find memories of the person her mother was before Alzheimer’s began to claim her mind. Nash is consumed by the desire to remember and record, to find ways to care for her mother’s memories and her own, as imperfect as those preservations may be. In doing so, she contemplates the loss of place that comes through the dispossession, gentrification, and migration she and her ancestors have been forced to navigate. Her essays explore the slow losses that illness and antiblackness embed in everyday life and the freedom that can be found in forgetting. Speaking to universal pains in the context of black experience, Memory Care is a moving and personal rumination on the many forms of grief that memories carry with them, why we hold onto them, and when to let them go.

Jennifer C. Nash is Jean Fox O’Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University and author of How We Write Now, Birthing Black Mothers, and Black Feminism Reimagined, all published by Duke University Press.