BookBrowse Reviews Dog Flowers by Danielle Geller

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In her memoir Dog Flowers, Danielle Geller shows herself to be familiar with abandonment, compulsion and survival, but she has one more trauma to face: the death of her mother.

In Dog Flowers, Danielle Geller tells us what is wrong with her family: heavy drinking, abandonment, grief. The intensity of her suffering breathes throughout the book. Dog Flowers is a private look into a troubled and chaotic world.

Geller begins her memoir with heartache. Her mother, Laureen "Tweety" Lee, suffers a seizure and heart attack at the age of 49. Tweety's daughters react differently to this event. Eileen is an emotional wreck, sobbing on the phone in despair, while older sister Danielle is pragmatic. When she sees her mother in a hospital bed, unresponsive, Danielle sadly says, "I came as soon as I could." Strangely, her mother's foot is still seizing while the rest of her is motionless. Danielle rubs the foot but is unable to kiss her mother.

Geller writes of her emotional state once back home in Boston, her mother dead and cremated, "I was not learning how to grieve my mother; I have been grieving her absence my entire life." Convincing herself she is all right, Danielle studies her mother's diaries as an archivist. Tweety wrote of travel, wreckage, early motherhood, alcohol and a drunk husband. Was she depressed, lonely, content? The diaries never say. Danielle transfers her energy to Eileen, an unstable drug addict. In one frantic scene, Danielle, the responsible sister, searches for Eileen in the middle of the night after a teary phone call.

Danielle's romantically portrayed return to the Navajo reservation where Tweety once lived for the memorial service acquaints her with a past she always longed for. Last on Navajo land at the age of three, she remembers fleeting images of a beautiful butterfly. Because her mother was silent about reservation life, everything Danielle experiences there is a revelation. Her aunt is maternal in the exact way her mother was not. Danielle discovers her cousin is her "cousin-sister." "In the Navajo culture, you're sisters through your grandmother," her aunt tells her. Danielle's cousin-sister remarks, "You sounded white on the phone. But you look like your Mom." This is one of the rare mentions of Danielle's mixed-race background, something she does not address as a source of conflict, confusion or pride.

A highlight of the memoir is its arresting photographs. One of Tweety, Eileen and Danielle is darkened by fading sunlight. It is hard to make out who is who as they embrace. In another photo is a clearer view of mother and daughters. A parakeet belonging to Danielle is on Tweety's shoulder, Eileen has a luminous smile and Danielle appears exhausted.

Dog Flowers is a difficult story that shines with an array of oddities. There are the birds Danielle is enamored of, including one named Berry, who has a "bare, pink butt." The author describes how once, on the way to Window Rock, Arizona, her father was bitten by a recluse spider after the cat jumped out of the car in Texas. She tells two accounts of how her great-grandmother, Pauline Tom, died: According to one family member, she froze to death after stumbling in her backyard, unable to crawl to shelter. According to another, she appeared to have been mysteriously dropped from a great height.

Often, we judge books by the absorption factor: Can we put them down or not? Dog Flowers is a story from which you have to take breaks. While not always explicit, the details can be grim. Danielle struggles with bipolar disorder and anxiety. She attempts suicide. Her sister is equally troubled, in and out of group homes and juvie camps, jail, detox programs. Her father Michael has psychotic episodes, is violent towards women, transitions in and out of jail, and is homeless for a period that feels agonizing.

After I finished the book, I was curious as to the early drafts, the ones Geller reportedly sent to her sister, who was in jail at the time. Eileen passed the pages to other inmates, who devoured the details of Tweety's death and the Geller girls' peculiar childhood. I wondered if those early drafts offered more insight into how Danielle felt about her family chaos. In the finished book, she recounts occasionally telling a friend she wants to die. But there isn't surrounding material or inward thought that validates an emotional space in which the reader can be a partner in her despair. Take a passage midway through the book where Geller confesses, "I have never wanted children; I am terrified of the thought of motherhood." This is a powerful statement that deserves follow up. Is it her mother's abandonment that creates anxiety and terror? Is it the dependency of children, their neediness and attachment? She doesn't address those kinds of questions but instead talks about how her grandmother crocheted her a baby blanket, hoping she would change her mind, a blanket she turned into a cat bed.

Memoirs are tricky in that they reveal only what the author chooses to reveal; and readers, if they are attentive, must honor an experience they have not lived. But readers are also hungry for a meaning and a why, and that's where Dog Flowers falls short. Everything about the story, one atrocity after another, is searingly intact. But Geller holds something back. Her memoir isn't a search for the truth so much as it is a search for a rainbow in a very dark cloud.

Even with its rigidity, however, I found the book necessary as a work of art. We need accounts of how children of alcoholics are harmed in the horrible quiet. When those like Geller, who have survived such experiences, write about love, loss, fragility and pain, when they document their tangled histories, they affirm their humanity in a society that standardizes extremes. We fetishize tiger moms, helicopter moms and soccer moms, forgetting about the less ideal truth of troubled mothers and their children. Dog Flowers shatters the myth of perfect motherhood and makes us uncomfortable with its astonishing realism. Page after page, Geller gives a view into a fraught, often unacknowledged world. That is its worth as a memoir, its moment and purpose. Long after reading it, you will be affected by the journey you have experienced.

This review first ran in the January 20, 2021 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.

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