Mother of Stories: An Elegy

In a breathtaking blend of lyrical memoir, photographs, and textual artifacts, Mother of Stories examines the complex legacy of a mother who was a gifted teacher, a passionate reader, and a pathological liar.

While Alice Dailey was immersed in an academic study of death in Shakespeare’s history plays, her mother died from toxic exposure to mold. Composed in a fugue of grief, Mother of Stories is Dailey’s uncompromising account of the months before and after her mother’s death. Through varied forms of episodic and visual recreation, Mother of Stories confronts what it means to inherit violent family narratives and, in their wake, to have to reconceive the borders between lived, imaginary, and literary experience.

A hybrid, richly imaginative work that synthesizes past and present, counterfeit and real, Mother of Stories oscillates between the inescapable weight of history and the cathartic liberation of art and storytelling. In constructing a poetic assemblage reminiscent at once of medieval miscellanies and contemporary experimental autotheory, Dailey’s acts of rehearsing, cutting, and folding history generate forms of radical critique that puncture and reconstitute the limits of literary nonfiction.

Alice Dailey is Professor of English at Villanova University, where she specializes in late medieval and early modern literature, with a particular focus on drama and death studies. She is the author of The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution and How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol.