“In this magnificent, searing memoir, Kyo Maclear takes us on a journey that is at once singular and utterly universal. What forces contribute to who we are and who we become? And what happens when the story we know to be true of ourselves is uprooted, unearthed? In poetic language that cuts to the bone, Maclear grapples with these questions and the result is a profound reading experience. I will never forget it.”
—Dani Shapiro
“Unearthing is simply staggering. Maclear takes the shocking revelations of a DNA test and transforms them into a mind-altering and supremely generous exploration of kinship, selfhood, memory, and the roots we share across time, space and species. A quantum leap for an already brilliant and profound writer and thinker.”
—Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything
“Unforgettable.”
—People
“Poetic, elliptical…By pairing the untangling of her family tree with an appreciation of the entanglement of the natural world, Maclear meditates on our desire to impose clear-cut boundaries on what comprises kinship and inheritance…a unique take on the paternity mystery memoir, one that eschews a predetermined narrative arc for a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to be a family…generous, open-handed.”
—NPR
“A moving account of a daughter’s struggle to know her mother before she loses her…Maclear is a beautiful and thorough writer. She accomplishes moving portraits of all three of her parents, all from fascinating and wildly different backgrounds…This story is a reminder of the abundance of experience present in all families, and the power and healing that can come from honoring those many truths.”
—The Washington Post
“Maclear meditates on genealogy and family secrets in her impressive memoir… Maclear’s precise, hypnotic prose will appeal to readers of Margaret Renkl. This quiet story lingers.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A deeply thoughtful meditation on secrets and stories, race and lineage, grief and grace – all told through the narrative of the common language … tending to a shared garden. As Maclear presses her reluctant mother for answers to the questions that have blown her life wide open, she comes to realize that amid the muddled memories and half-truths also lie lessons in what it takes for new things to grow – patience, pragmatism and a willingness to accept beauty (whether in flowers and plants or the ineffable bonds of family) in all its wild, unruly forms.”
—Tabassum Siddiqi, The Globe and Mail
“Maclear’s writing is poetic in the best sense. Using the image of her mother’s wild, rambling garden as a foundation, Maclear examines these questions in detail, without proposing a pat answer to any of them because, ultimately, they are unanswerable. Instead, Maclear allows the reader to struggle with them as she did, granting her audience the space and silence to reconcile the gaps and secrets in their own lives.”
—BookPage
“A powerful, captivating new memoir.”
—Shondaland