Santa Barbara

I grew up in a house of secrets. Every family has a story. You grow up with your version of it, but as an adult that narrative shifts beneath your feet as more facts are revealed.

When I was 27, my mother told me she was a mail-order bride. She didn’t phrase it that way, exactly; rather that Eli, the American who became my stepfather, was a man who had written to her when we lived in the former Soviet Union. It was because of Eli that she put me and my brother on