From boxes of memorabilia, sifting out a life

AFTER HER MOTHER DIED, Danielle Geller defaulted to what she knew. Tucked away in her Boston apartment, she spent entire days writing about her life — her earliest memories of her mother, sister and father; her childhood and the grandmother who raised her — everything leading up to her mother’s final days in a Florida hospital.

Geller wrote 80,000 words, but remained unsatisfied. She still had unresolved questions about her mother. “My mother lived entire lives apart from mine,” Geller noted.

So Geller, a trained archivist, assembled her mother’s belongings, labeling, dating and describing every photograph, diary and letter.

With this as a starting point, Geller sought to understand her mother’s many lives. It wasn’t easy. Both of Geller’s parents struggled with substance abuse; her white father was emotionally abusive, and she witnessed him physically abusing her mother and sister. Geller was tempted, she writes, “to erase the questions and unknowns from