In the winter of 2021, Emma J. Cummings tied a thin blue ribbon to the handle of a cardboard file box and swore she would not loosen it until she faced the recordings inside. A month later, after her mother died in a small apartment off Linden Avenue in Dayton, Emma pulled a battered Sony cassette recorder from the box, pressed play, and lay very still as a familiar voice returned with stories layered in cigarette smoke and laughter. The tapes carried her back to the pontoon boat on Indian Lake with its stubborn outboard, to Capri Lanes and the weight of a ball in a small hand, to a red Pontiac Sunfire forever smelling of grape soda and winter salt. They carried the sweetness of a summer at Catawba Island and the strangled quiet of the night the ambulance lights filled the living room. They carried the seam ripper and the Singer Featherweight, the way her mother measured hems with the yellow tape, the way she measured hurts with the same gentle certainty. They carried shame and stubbornness and the good jokes that still made Emma smile in the dark.
Emma drives from a motel on Keowee Street to a storage unit with the number 17B on the rusted door, then farther along I 70 to St. Louis and Santa Fe, to Ocean Springs where her mother kept a shoebox of ticket stubs and a Polaroid of a wren perched on a chain link fence. She writes about being kicked out of St. Brendan Catholic School after a spray paint mural of a comet, about the way her stepbrother Caleb slept in his winter coat all summer, about meeting Anika in a Bozeman canoe shop and learning the quiet trust of shared mornings. She writes about Theo and Wren and the terrifying brightness of motherhood, about relapse and a meeting room above a pizza place in Laramie, about a counselor who pressed a blue ribbon into her palm and said tie it somewhere you will see it when the world narrows. She writes about neighborhoods that know you by your dog and your debt, about the way grief teaches you the shape of your own endurance.
A Ribbon of Resilience braids Emma s voice with letters scrawled in her mother s looping script, transcriptions of cassettes scarred with static, and margin notes that are both prayer and argument. It is a conversation lifted across distance and time, a map of rental kitchens and county lines, of pawnshops like King s Loan on Fifth and a Waffle House off I 55 at dawn, of objects that will never be trivial again a cracked turquoise bowl, a gold locket shaped like an acorn, a folded bus schedule to Taos. Fiercely tender and unsentimental, this memoir insists on the complicated abundance of a life lived in the open, on the way a narrow ribbon can become a lifeline when you pull it through every rung of a hard year and keep walking.
I struggled to stay engaged.
Se siente como si dialogara con "Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls" de T Kira Madden y "Abandon Me" de Melissa Febos: prosa honesta, estructura fragmentaria, una intimidad que a veces muerde.
Algunas repeticiones de listas de objetos y rutas de viaje diluyen el pulso, pero las cintas y la foto del reyezuelo en la cerca le dan corazón. Para lectoras que buscan memoria familiar y recuperación sin azúcar.
This is a book of reckonings and rituals, tracing how objects turn into anchors. Again and again, the memoir returns to the notion that "a narrow ribbon becomes a lifeline" — the ribbon on the file box, the measuring tape that sizes both hems and hurts, the bus schedule folded like a talisman. The throughline of endurance lands with clarity, especially in the scenes above the pizza place in Laramie and the neighborhoods that know you by your dog and your debt. At times the symbolism leans heavy, and the map of rental kitchens can blur place into pattern, but the closing insistence on complicated abundance resonates.
What lingered for me was not the travel from Keowee Street to St. Louis to Santa Fe, but the relationship staged across reels and handwriting. Emma and her mother feel like two distinct presences in the room, generous and flawed, both funny in the way that survives a hard year.
The Capri Lanes memory, the stubborn outboard on Indian Lake, the stepbrother sleeping through July in a winter coat, the quiet trust with Anika in a canoe shop — these aren't decorations. They're the way Emma understands motive and mercy. The dialogue between recorded voice and daughter's interior monologue builds an intimacy that feels earned and unsentimental.
As memoir craft, this is quietly meticulous. Cummings assembles a braid of letters, cassette transcriptions, and present-tense scenes that click into place with patient momentum; the static on the tapes becomes a kind of metronome. The margin notes act as counterpoint, prayer, and rebuttal, enlarging the emotional frame without tipping into melodrama. A few mid-book inventories of the storage unit slow the pace, but the precision of details — the Singer Featherweight, the yellow tape, the cracked turquoise bowl — keeps the mosaic cohesive.
Cummings unknots grief by pressing play on her mother's tapes and drives from Dayton to Ocean Springs and back through years of small, indelible objects.
