Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home

by Elizabeth Mosier

Literary Nonfiction. "The strings of a violin have to be held in place on both ends, and the two poles of Elizabeth Mosier's book are memory (as archaeology) and forgetting (in the very moving passages about the author's mother and her descent into the blankness of Alzheimer's). The music of this book is very fine indeed, and its passion is for the preservation of objects, moments, persons, and places that Elizabeth Mosier has loved. In its clear-sighted lyric eloquence, this book is unforgettable."--Charles Baxter

Genres: Nonfiction

96 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2019

About the author

Novelist and essayist Elizabeth Mosier logged 1,000 volunteer hours processing colonial-era artifacts at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park Archeology Laboratory to write Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home (New Rivers Press, 2019). A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, her nonfiction has been selected as notable in Best American Essays and appears widely in journals and newspapers including Cleaver, Creative Nonfiction, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Poets and Writers. She writes the “Intersections” column for the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin.

Reviews

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A heartfelt perspective on the aging and passing of the greatest generation from the boomer offspring. Touching connections across generations. Will assist anyone contemplating what to do with your parents' brown furniture. Exquisite yet simple prose that amplifies the complexities of life decisions. Reference to Charlotte's Web has placed the EB White classic on my "want to read list." Thank you Libby - the dig was a gift.

[LuAnne Banks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and thoughtful memoir

[Jeffrey Lageson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Mosier has compiled many of her most important memories from her childhood, college years, raising a family, volunteering for archaeology preservations, and dealing with her mother’s Alzheimer’s. The author does a compelling comparison as to what is important in preserving personal memories to what is important in preserving historical artifacts. If you have elderly parents, or someone you love going through Alzheimer’s, these stories should help you decide what is meaningful and has purpose from your past.
As Mosier reminisces about how keeping diaries, letters, and old photos helped in remembering an event, vacation, holiday, etc., people couldn’t imagine then how our lives now are being recorded almost daily. As a result, she comments that these constant records of reality might change the special memory one has as to how we remember it.
The idea of being “a privy picker” for a career made me smile, and that the items found in the “pits” are important in teaching how people lived by what they threw away.
I agreed with Mosier that all of our senses can pull a memory and how unimaginable it would be for someone with Alzheimer’s to have nothing to trigger a memory. So, they’re living a life void of a past, and their family members are nonexistent.
It was interesting reading her ideas on why people keep certain memories and not others – what makes an event become a permanent memory to somebody, and does that memory really show the truth as to what happened?
One of Mosier’s comments that meant something to me was, “the words we choose to tell a story make history, an account that, some day, generations after ours will tell about who we are now.”

[Maribel Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm still reading, have to say, this is a richly detailed memoir where the author makes sense of her life as a mother, daughter, writer, archeologist...This book is beautifully written. This author makes you notice how life's regular (and sometimes) mundane details can be easy to overlook or discounted, but, if you look deeper, everything tells a story. This book is filled with so many poignant and thoughtful nuggets of writing. For example:

On texts:

“None of these exchanges are particularly memorable-unless made ridiculous by autocorrect—but they are important to me. These messages, spontaneous and ephemeral, are markers of my real relationships, the moment-to-moment record of my life as it’s lived.”

Big trees that marked her childhood and adolescence:

"Certain artifacts from our pasts are discarded; others stay with us, charged with emotional power. I visit the Big Tree every time I’m in Phoenix; from my desk, I search for the God’s eye view of it on Google Maps. The tree often appears in my stories and essays, as itself or in disguise…”

Writing:

“Writing is something like building a bottle from the base up using broken glass scattered on a table, glittering and inscrutable. And then taking it apart again to slowly fashion a story from the findings."

There are so many gorgeous quotes that I want to write them all down. The way that she writes about her mother's slow descent into dementia...you feel like you are right there with her, but also that, everything is going to be OK. Really awesome book...

[Kylie Ness · Rating 1 out of 5]

The story Excavating Memory by Elizabeth Mosier is confusing, boring, and eye-opening, for some. The author excavated her own memories and wrote them down. Many of the memories may not make sense to us as the readers but they make sense to the author. It was hard to tell if she was writing this for and about her mother or if this was for her.
The author did a good job of making it known at the beginning of the book that these memories would not all piece together, just like how what she excavates not not all piece together because they are not all the same thing. Her memories are unique just like the pieces found in the dirt.
I do not quite understand why she choose these memories. I did find some of it boring and hard to follow. Her final chapter called Believers really helped to make sense of some of the memories that she choose. I do not get what message she is trying to send to the readers but I believe it has something to do with how our memories are our past. I think the author is trying to tell us that how memories are sacred and special. They tell a story. Sometimes you have to shift through the rubble to find the treasure. This is a book I will probably not read again but it was not half bad. Not only did she excavate her own memories but is seems like she wanted the readers to excavate her as well to find the message that she was trying to deliver.

[Jennifer J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

After attending a talk given by the author, I couldn’t wait to dig into these essays. Mosier’s writing takes me into my own history of home and personal archaeology, and brings out new hopes and understanding.