My dead parents - Anya Yurchyshyn

"As I've slowly gotten to know my parents at least a little better, have learned of their struggles, their successes, heartache, and loss, I have finally begun to accept and to love them, maybe not as my parents, not yet, but simply as people." In the wake of her alcoholic mother's death, Anya Yurchyshyn returned to her large, cluttered childhood home on Boston's Beacon Hill to sort through her parents' belongings. She didn't feel sad, rather she was relieved that her mother's decades-long battle with grueling depression and self-inflicted isolation were over.
Sifting through old boxes and drawers, Anya discovered artifacts of a life, a love affair, and glamorous people that she barely recognized--yet, these people were her parents. Letters, photos of exotic locales, startling documents, and passionate letters revealed stark evidence of a hidden past that forced her to reconstruct and reimagine everything she'd ever known about her life and her family. She'd always assumed that her parents never loved each other, that her mother slowly drank herself to death after her father's mysterious death in the Ukraine, and that her father was an overbearing man devoid of compassion. How then, to explain the poetic, profound, and playful letters her father wrote, ones returned by her mother's deep words of love and humor.
Part literary thriller, part detective story, My Dead Parents is the account of one woman's relentless quest to solve the tragic and complex mysteries of her past, and in so doing, to come more fully to terms with her life today.