Book Description
Tria Wen’s intergenerational memoir endeavors to break the cycle of women living for others before themselves, examining how roles like “wife,” “mother,” and “daughter” can keep us from pursuing what makes us feel most alive
Following the death of her mother, Tria Wen breaks apart the careful life she’s built and explodes her seemingly perfect marriage with a love affair. Torn between two lives, she seeks guidance in her mother’s journals and letters going back thirty years, and there, she meets versions of her mother she never knew: a girl who left behind an entire self after immigration, an artist in the role of housewife, and a woman who wanted more time.
This new perspective allows Wen to see her mother not only as her mother but also as a woman with many lives and dreams unfulfilled. As Wen grapples with the legacy of these unrealized dreams and how that legacy has shaped her own life, her grieving transforms into a sweeping and compassionate study of a woman’s relationship between art, intimacy, and caregiving.
Drawing from some of the most intimate pieces of Wen’s and her mother’s journals, All of Us Wildflowers moves back and forth in time, weaving together a rich tapestry of love, longing, and loss that asks: Where does a mother’s story end and a daughter’s begin? With tender and lyrical prose, and unflinching honesty, Wen’s memoir is a deeply felt meditation on sacrifice, faith, and personal fulfillment.
Praise For This Book
"Tria Wen’s All of Us Wildflowers asks the reader to look again at the life we hold closely against the lives we couldn’t live." —E.J. Koh, author of The Magical Language of Others“All of Us Wildflowers is a breathtakingly honest story, told in mesmerizing, interwoven spirals through time. A testament to the power of journaling, of writing unfiltered to one’s self and loved ones, Tria Wen probes what it means, through her own writing and through her late mother’s journals, to be a woman with dreams of being more than a wife, daughter, and daughter-in-law. These conversations of grief and longing take readers through a circuitous journey of a single pivotal day, through childhood memories, the loss of a parent and the aftermath of a secret affair. This book is an intimate, vulnerable and profoundly generous read. It grabbed at my heart.” —Susan Kiyo Ito, author of I Would Meet You Anywhere
