I LOVED MY mother very much. Idolised her, even. She surfed, so I surfed bigger waves off islands in the Indian Ocean. She hiked, so I trekked off to New Zealand, Ladakh and Morocco. She had wanted to work in film, so together we made a documentary. I followed in her footsteps as a writer too: reading the same feminist memoirs, collaborating on magazine assignments, and finally – during the months that she required hospice care – writing side-­by-­side with her on the twin beds we shared in my grandparents’ house.

Earlier that summer she’d had me clear out her storage unit in Southern California, distributing things and consolidating others into my own storage: her journals, creative writing, news clippings, photographs, pre-­digital film, mementos and other archival ephemera. Her worldly possessions were shrinking in pace with her body. Maybe she understood that I’d need such memory objects to cling to once she was gone. This early bequest came with the unspoken proviso that I would one day do something with my mother’s literary archives of self.