" Memoir is a fixative. Put the life on the page, and there the life is. She will forever be running home across the creek. She will send (and again send) her uncle raw and banged-up poems. She will marry the exotic man and relentlessly fear her own unexotica. She will raise her only child with implacable regret and she will keep wishing she had done better, she had done more. She will despair here, honor that, leave the rest of everything absent. Her I becoming a you becoming a we becoming a she becoming her version, and from here on out she will represent that version, she will speak on its behalf, and through it. "

― Beth Kephart , Wife Daughter Self: A Memoir in Essays