Letters to Memory Synopsis
Karen is a giant in Asian American literature, and this new work is a skeleton key for her fiction, positioning it in relationship to her family history and her wide-ranging curiosity, and offering fans a glimpse into the sources of her imaginative work
While this is the story of the internment and its repercussions for the Yamashita family, Karen's formal choices, including using different disciplines as lenses for ideas (forgiveness, debt, civil rights) make it an expansive work of deep moral seriousness
Documentary instincts are a part of Karen's writing (most visible in I Hotel and Circle K Cycles) but historical grounding and issues of migration, integration, separation (voluntary and not), and community making are present in all.
Despite the gravity of the subject, Karen is reliably a funny writer, and one whose voice (casual, disarming, a tug on the sleeve) animates these stories
The use of primary source materials makes the characters come alive, we can see their handwriting, their faces, their paintings.
The book links back to an extensive archive of correspondence, photography, and other holdings, making the book far larger than what's on the page.
