Memory & Desire

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 fathers
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. Th us 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.