Someday We Won't Remember This: A Forensic Memoir of My Father's Secrets

"My dad tried to kill my mom," I told him. . . . though I didn't know what happened, I knew that he had wanted her dead.

Doc McLemore's earliest memory is of their father, Don, having a seizure when they were three. But Don McLemore wasn't even home at the time when the seizure reportedly happened. He was locked up in an Oregon mental hospital. Despite denials from both parents, their recollection of the seizure persisted, along with nightmares of Don trying to murder them.

In Someday We Won't Remember This, Doc McLemore crafts an investigation into their father, a man hurled screaming from the South only to wander toward an erratic life in Oregon. Collecting shreds of information--medical records, court documents, interviews, journal entries, personal memories, and photographs--McLemore collages together each version of the story they thought they knew. What results is a decoupage of illness, poverty, and moments of humor, despite everything: McLemore serenades a cowboy who sits on horseback in his underwear as the inebriated Don threatens McLemore's husband-to-be, John, with a knife and then gifts the weapon to John as an act of reconciliation. After not speaking for years, McLemore and their half-sibling, drunk and stoned, get the same corny tattoo their father bears on his chest, though the two sidestep any acknowledgment of their shared trauma.

McLemore portrays a father whose love and violence live in equal measure, while unpacking their own marriage, trans identity, and struggle with addiction. Someday We Won't Remember This ultimately dares to ask: Between family secrets, missing links, and corrupted memories, how can a child become a whole person?

Doc McLemore is a writer who calls Oregon, West Virginia, and New Orleans home. Their work ties together considerations of class, gender, memory, and justice while also trying to find language for how frantically beautiful this misery can be. Their writing has appeared in Salvation South, The Activist History Review, and The Sunlight Press.

Review Quotes:

"Doc McLemore's riveting debut isn't just a haunting portrait of mental illness, violence, addiction, complex love, forgiveness, and the half-truths and half-lies families sculpt into myth, though it's all of those things and more. It's also an unsparing story of self-discovery and meditation on identity, on the limits of understanding our own pasts, and, by extension, our own selves. But mostly, it's a thrilling family memoir that's impossible to put down."--Jonathan Bernstein, author of What Do You Do When You're Lonesome: The Authorized Biography of Justin Townes Earle

"In this stunning debut, Doc McLemore delivers a page-turning narrative that turns on the intricacies of personal and family memory. A forthright and incisive honesty informs McLemore's profound insights, chiseled forensically from the stone of familial lore and the aftermath of failed relationships. This is a book about what it's like to love someone who goes missing and how to forge a self from, as Whitman puts it, 'what deepest remains.' Be prepared to read this book, feel completely satisfied, and go back to read it again."--Kim Dana Kupperman, series editor of The Best American Essays

"McLemore's memoir is a kaleidoscopic autopsy that both undoes and makes whole. With the observance only an artist turned scientist can exact, they turn over their life, family history, and place in a larger story. McLemore is gentle, vulnerable, and unrelenting, balancing the precision of a scalpel and the courage and compassion of a love letter that's also a Dear John. This is the kind of voice that makes sense in a world with no absolutes. This is the kind of memoir that matters. It beats like a drum in your chest."--Gina G. Warren, author of Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement

"Someday We Won't Remember This captures the wake left by an absent father--shaped as much by forces beyond his control as by those within it. It traces the gravity of family bonds and the ways they shape the stories we struggle to claim as our own. Deeply personal and unflinching, it moves between fact and fiction to show how unreliable--and necessary--both can be."--Raymond Thompson Jr., author of Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster

"Someday We Won't Remember This is a promethean debut of excoriating empathy. McLemore's incisive prose makes each moment of dejection as luminous as a recent dream--our own small fists on the tailgate as we cry "That's my daddy!" As the cigarette smoke fills the room around you, you'll know this is how memoir ought to be written."--Wes Jamison, author of My Corpse Inside