The Memories You Keep
Fragments of Silence and Survival
A MEMOIR
The Memories You Keep examines the fractured inheritance of growing up in a household shaped by generational addiction and mental illness. Fragments of Silence and Survival reflects both the instability of memory and the emotional terrain of my childhood: a narcissistic alcoholic father whose presence was volatile and consuming, and a schizoid mother whose distance left a profound silence at the core of family life.
What remains are not seamless narratives but fragments — moments of rupture, long corridors of silence, and the subtle survival strategies that made endurance possible. These works acknowledge that memory is partial, that silence itself becomes a form of inheritance, and that survival is not grand or heroic but carried in the quiet rhythms of daily life.
These fragments take form not through overt gesture but through atmosphere and restraint. Rooms, figures, and domestic landscapes appear suspended, their surfaces stilled, their tension residing in what is implied rather than declared. The work neither condemns nor celebrates; instead, it honors the complexity of memory as it is lived — fractured, silent, enduring.
By gathering these fragments into visibility, The Memories You Keep becomes not only a personal history, but also a recognition of the unspoken narratives carried quietly across generations by many whose lives have been shaped by addiction and mental illness.