Let’s Never Talk About This Again: A Memoir

At first, when starting this book, I thought the story more appropriate for the tween set and their compulsion to unfold the mystery of sex; but reading further into this family memoir emotionally tied me to the content. It is a beautiful story, filled with poignancy, compassion, frustration, and humor crisply describing parental and filial love flooding across and drowning discomforting questions or embarrassing activities. The reader can identify with all the uncomfortable memories of a parent’s behavior, in this case, it’s the secret pornographic publications of the author’s strait-laced father, a fact carefully hidden from the children. Only as the beloved father succumbs to early-onset Alzheimer’s disease does this salacious characteristic again emerge. Describing her own maturation over the years, the author fondly and with biting humor chronicles the exasperating, yet loving relationship between her father and herself. Yet the thought of the crafty sex manuals authored by her dad secretly during her childhood and now reopened by the dementia is a riddle that plagues her memories. This is a compellingly relatable memoir that rouses memories of absurdities within our own families and life problems that can only be managed with a strong potion of love tempered with humor.