In Danielle Geller’s debut memoir, Dog Flowers, a daughter returns home to the Navajo reservation to confront her family’s history and retrace her mother’s life—using both narrative and archive in this arrestingly original memoir.
After Danielle’s mother dies of a withdrawal from alcohol during a period of homelessness, she is forced to return to Florida. Using her training as a librarian and archivist, Geller collects her mother’s documents, diaries, and photographs into a single suitcase and begins on a journey of confronting her family’s history and the decisions she’s been forced to make, a journey that will end at her mother’s home: the Navajo reservation.
“This beautiful memoir is not to be missed.”
Praise for Dog Flowers
“This courageous, honest, desperate, tender, and compelling book tells a daughters’ story of her troubled mother. In Dog Flowers, we learn that while immediate family can fall apart, an extended family , a tribe, ties a tight web that might just hold.”
“Geller’s mix of archival research and personal memoir allows readers to see a refreshing variety of perspectives and layers, resulting in an eye-opening, moving narrative. A deftly rendered, powerful story of family, grief, and the search for self.”
“A riveting and searching memoir… Geller’s finely crafted work of extraordinary strength and survival spans worlds, encompassing life and after-life.”
“An introspective reflection on the complexities of family relationships.”
“[A] journey story we’ve never read before… An honest, intimate, and heart wrenching memoir that explores fractured family, the damaging effects of alcoholism and poverty, and what it means to seek healing from legacies of trauma. This book gave me chills.”
—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina
Danielle Geller 