A  guest post from Gabriela Frank:

Gabriela Frank

How many times have I killed my mother? In reality, she died once, but if you count every essay and story of mine in which she appears, the woman has expired countless times at my hands.

In a recent workshop I was asked to share my obsessions, the topics I can’t stop writing about. My shallow confession was an addiction to travel writing—true enough, I’ve written a book about it—but that night as I lay daydreaming about my latest story, I realized that I am actually obsessed with the far-reaching effects of my mother’s death. She died of brain cancer when she was forty-five and I was sixteen. Since then, I’ve written obsessively about losing her—my journals a fire hose of raw emotion, my fiction and essays populated with quests for a sense of self—and mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters and friends, all dying…