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Book Reviewed by:A daughter returns home to the Navajo reservation to retrace her mother's life in a memoir that is both a narrative and an archive of one family's troubled history.
When Danielle Geller's mother dies of alcohol withdrawal during an attempt to get sober, Geller returns to Florida and finds her mother's life packed into eight suitcases. Most were filled with clothes, except for the last one, which contained diaries, photos, and letters, a few undeveloped disposable cameras, dried sage, jewelry, and the bandana her mother wore on days she skipped a hair wash.
Geller, an archivist and a writer, uses these pieces of her mother's life to try and understand her mother's relationship to home, and their shared need to leave it. Geller embarks on a journey where she confronts her family's history and the decisions that she herself had been forced to make while growing up, a journey that will end at her mother's home: the Navajo reservation.
Dog Flowers is an arresting, photo-lingual memoir that masterfully weaves together images and text to examine mothers and mothering, sisters and caretaking, and colonized bodies. Exploring loss and inheritance, beauty and balance, Danielle Geller pays homage to our pasts, traditions, and heritage, to the families we are given and the families we choose.
Dog Flowers is a difficult story that shines with an array of oddities. But Geller holds something back. Her memoir isn't a search for the truth so much as it is a search for a rainbow in a very dark cloud. Even with its rigidity, however, I found the book necessary as a work of art. We need accounts of how children of alcoholics are harmed in the horrible quiet. When those like Geller, who have survived such experiences, write about love, loss, fragility and pain, when they document their tangled histories, they affirm their humanity in a society that standardizes extremes...continued
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(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
Danielle Geller's memoir Dog Flowers portrays how both of her parents struggled with substance abuse. Her mother, Tweety, drank heavily, stopped cold turkey and suffered seizures. Her father, Michael, had a long history of drug use, psychotic episodes and violence. National Surveys on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) data estimates that 8.7 million children aged 17 years or younger in the United States — about 12.3% of children in the country overall — are living with at least one parent with a substance abuse disorder. About 10.5% live with a parent with an alcohol abuse disorder and about 2.9% live with a parent with an illicit drug use disorder.
Addiction is often called a "family disease" because of the collateral damage. It ...
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Use what talents you possess: The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best
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Heid E. Erdrich, award-winning poet, author, and editor of the award-winning New Poets of Native Nations
Dog Flowers pulls the few remaining threads of an unraveled family life. This courageous, honest, desperate, tender, and compelling book tells a daughter's story of her troubled mother. In Dog Flowers, we learn that a handful of threads can never reweave the blanket of family, or patch up what a mother's abandonment has torn. What little we learn of Geller's Navajo mother comes from collaged notes and journal entries, photographs and reportage; it's a story full of gaps. Which is exactly what's remarkable about this book: Geller does not seek to make anything whole but herself. She refuses to deal in the tropes of redemption and reconciliation—which just shows how much strength it takes not to judge another's life or lie about it. Even her return to her mother's Navajo Nation does not bring about an easy cultural reunion, although it does give us a satisfying sense that while an immediate family can fall apart, an extended family, a tribe, ties a tight web that might just hold.
