Book Overview

The autobiographical novel, Memory and Desire, traces the gradual but inexorable disintegration of a family.

At the outset, when thirty-nine year old Daria Khasmanov recovers memories of her father's prolonged sexual assaults, she cannot connect the parent she knows today with the predator of her recollections. And she persuades herself that the past can be divided from the present.

Her determination to thereby save the family, however, is soon shattered when she is overcome by a sudden, irresistible compulsion to tell all. Thus begins a chain of events which, over the course of seventeen years, leads to the inevitable dissolution of the familial ties she had long labored to preserve.