Close, A Family Memoir

This manuscript braids together two narratives. One is about my immediate family: my father had three boys—my older brothers—with his first wife, who died, after two years of illness, when my brothers were young. I am his only child with my mother, who was twenty-six when she married my dad and took on the role of parenting the boys. The second narrative traces my fixation, as a young, single woman, on romantic love: I write a blog about relationships, and have long been consumed by a search for connection shaped by the isolation I’ve felt within my family. The arc of the second narrative ties into the first as the narrator, after years of feeling afraid to write about the family and focusing on relationships instead, finally begins to tell the family's story—to her surprise, engaging them in that process.Creative WritingMastersUniversity of New Mexico. Dept. of EnglishMartin, GregoryHuyler, FrankShigekuni, JulieRapp, Emil