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“But if I could invent rather than just observe, I would. Because fiction writers have so very much more access to truth — some kind of truth at least. Even truths draped in delusion or hope, a world gone so bad it couldn’t possibly resemble reality — even those upside-down, backwards truths speak volumes about what’s missing, what’s desired, about the world the way we wish it were.” - Landslide: True Stories by Minna Zallman Proctor ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Landslide is characterized as true stories, which I think is interesting given Proctor’s work is essentially an examination of what is true and what is story. Rather than calling this a short story collection, I would call it a collection of essays which tell us about pivotal aspects of her life: motherhood, divorce, her relationship with her own mother, and her relationship to language and writing. I love memoirs in essays, but didn’t enjoy the disjointed and chaotic nature of Landslide. Perhaps it’s intentional: like our relationships and our sense of self, memory and our relationship to it is tenuous and ever changing. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ I find memoir as a genre endlessly fascinating - both because I get to examine people’s lives and because I get to examine the stories people choose to tell about their lives. While Landslide isn’t a new favorite, I know it may be for others — in fact, I’d recommend this to fans of Crying in H Mart for similar themes of fraught mother-daughter relationships, caretaking, and grief/loss. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ TW: cancer, death of a parent via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/CViBTqHL0ev/