The Wreck: A Daughter's Memoir of Becoming a Mother
Cassandra Jackson
Viking Press
There is a secret that young Cassandra Jackson doesn’t know, and it’s evident in the way her father cries her name out in his sleep. Through awkward encounters with family, she comes to realize that she is named after her father’s niece, and looks eerily like the child’s mother, both of whom were killed in a car wreck along with her father’s beloved mother, and—as she soon discovers—his first wife. Cassandra learns to keep silent about the wreck, but soon learns there is no way to outpace the claw-like grip of her family’s past trauma. In this luminous memoir, Jackson attempts to unearth her lost family, while also creating a new one–only to discover little progress separates the past from the present.