Eldest daughter
Date
2024
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
Eldest Daughter is a memoir in essays that explores the boundaries of home and self, braiding together threads of the Midwest, horses, grief, illness, water, and family. By structuring itself into three "waves," Eldest Daughter underscores the currents of mourning, loss, and becoming. When we meet the narrator, she is stuck in the middle of a Midwestern flood, trying to wrangle horses from the mud as her mother seeks to save their home from destruction. This starts the work off with the explicit statement that this is a narrator at a crossroads—or perhaps a series of them—as we watch her navigate the intersections of grief and family, femininity and masculinity, horse and human, and landscapes of both the Midwest and Colorado. By the end of Eldest Daughter, the narrator has a better understanding of the contours of her grief, anger, and role as the eldest daughter. As such, the pieces in Eldest Daughter attempt to answer, in sixteen pieces and just over two hundred pages, questions of: How do I grieve loss? How can I attempt to name the unsaid, to give it life and depth? How and where do I feel at home? Or, more specifically, how, and where, do I feel like myself?
Description
Rights Access
Embargo expires: 05/20/2026.
Subject
horses
Midwest
memoir
grief