In Memory, American poet Dorothea Lasky uses the essay format to resist the idea that memory is a reliable record of experience, approaching it instead as something continually reconstructed through language, imagination and desire.

The book moves from childhood and the loss of her parents to David Hockney, female anger, artistic influence and the peculiar intimacy of remembering people who can no longer remember us. Lasky's writing is conversational, digressive and deliberately resistant to the boundaries between poetry and prose. An apparently minor recollection can open into a consideration of identity, artistic inheritance or the obligations we have towards the dead.

Throughout, she is interested in how the stories we tell about ourselves become inseparable from the selves we believe ourselves to be. Illustrated with black-and-white artwork, Memory is an unusual collection of essays about the instability of recollection and the relationship between making art and making sense of a life.

Edition/Condition: Spiral House (Silver Press), UK, 2025. Paperback in very good condition, with light shelf wear and minor rubbing to the covers. Interior pages appear clean and unmarked.