Someday We Won't Remember This

"My dad tried to kill my mom," I told him. . . . though I didn't know what happened, I knew that he had wanted her dead.

Doc McLemore's earliest memory is of their father, Don, having a seizure when they were three. But Don McLemore wasn't even home at the time when the seizure reportedly happened. He was locked up in an Oregon mental hospital. Despite denials from both parents, their recollection of the seizure persisted, along with nightmares of Don trying to murder them.

In Someday We Won't Remember This, Doc McLemore crafts an investigation into their father, a man hurled screaming from the South only to wander toward an erratic life in Oregon. Collecting shreds of information—medical records, court documents, interviews, journal entries, personal memories, and photographs—McLemore collages together each version of the story they thought they knew. What results is a decoupage of illness, poverty, and moments of humor, despite everything: McLemore serenades a cowboy who sits on horseback in his underwear as the inebriated Don threatens McLemore's husband-to-be, John, with a knife and then gifts the weapon to John as an act of reconciliation. After not speaking for years, McLemore and their half-sibling, drunk and stoned, get the same corny tattoo their father bears on his chest, though the two sidestep any acknowledgment of their shared trauma.

McLemore portrays a father whose love and violence live in equal measure, while unpacking their own marriage, trans identity, and struggle with addiction. Someday We Won't Remember This ultimately dares to ask: Between family secrets, missing links, and corrupted memories, how can a child become a whole person?