Woman with a Bottle and Flames

Woman with a Bottle and Flames is a collection of personal essays about growing up and living as a motherless daughter. The pieces walk the line of sentimentality without falling victim to it. For example, in the title piece, the pain of loss is explored through the experience of tattooing, an external pain that creates visible and elective scars. In "Without a Sound" and "Normal," traumatic events like abortion and cancer diagnosis become solitary experiences and resonate with the absence of mothering. Personal relationships are more actively explored in "Learning to Pose" and "Three-Legged Race." While "Three-Legged Race" dissects the changes in a childhood friendship, "Learning to Pose" exposes calculated flirtation and its origins in the example of the author's mother. Another relationship---that with alcohol---is explored here for both the author and her mother primarily in "Rituals" but also in "Whisper All the Things." This piece, however, also tells the stories of two days---both the day the author's mother died in a car accident and the day, fourteen years later, when the author finally visits her grave. Memory and remembrance through artifacts are used in all these pieces, but primarily in "Whisper All the Things" and "What My Mother Left Me," which delve deeply and centrally into the objects the author uses to hold onto the mother she lost at eight.