Danielle was interviewed by Jessica Douglass for High Country News about her memoir Dog Flowers.

HCN: Are there any particular passages in Dog Flowers that you are most proud of? 

DG: There is a passage on this idea of “ghost sickness” that when I first wrote it, I was like, this is it — this is key to how I am thinking about my relationship with my mother’s belongings, with this history and her death. What I say in that section is that I’m not writing about grief, I’m not writing about losing my mother or those feelings of grief, because I don’t think this book really offers you a path through that.

Instead, I’m writing about (how) I feel possessed. I feel haunted by her life as much as her death, and the things that I wanted from that relationship that I didn’t get. I felt most proud when I emerged from the writing of that passage, because I was articulating early on what I was setting out to do.