Reviewed by Hannah Straton
Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents 
(University of Nebraska Press, 2019) is a collection of short essays about the inherited nature of identity. A group of twenty-five writers reflects on the ways in which they are like their parents, the ways they have strived to avoid certain unwanted parental traits, and the various lessons their parents taught them, both intentionally and inadvertently. Apple, Tree is a beautiful collection that entertains, delights, saddens, and makes the reader consider their own inherited identity.
In “Lies My Parents (Never but Maybe Should’ve) Told Me,” Shukree Hassan Tilghman interrogates growing up in a household that always told the truth even (especially) when it was painful to hear, “My parents would dole out the cold hard truth like it was medicine for the illusion inclined. I asked why it was chilly in the house—again. The furnace is broken, and there’s no money to fix it. Why? Because they don’t pay teachers in this country and we’re broke.” By the end of the essay, Tilghman turns that interrogation inward and considers the lies he has decided to tell his daughter.
In “One Man’s Poison,” Kyoko Mori writes of her mother’s suicide and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. “I didn’t fear becoming Hiroshi because he was beyond the pale, in a category by himself. So I believed it was my mother, not my father whose legacy required careful navigation.” Through careful introspection and exquisite prose, Mori discovers it was the traits she inherited from her father that allowed her to avoid her mother’s fate.
Mat Johnson remembers the different versions of his mother– from her as a young single mom to her in a nursing home in the final stages of multiple sclerosis, in “My Story About My Mother.” He says, “The word Mom is both intimate and generic. It speaks of the history and intensity of our relationship, but there are major parts of her to which I will never have access, by situation, by her choice, by mine…Mom is a title and once it was her job, but now it declares my responsibility.” Johnson revels in what he knows of his mother and wonders in what he can never know.
Lise Funderburg has collected diverse stories of parenthood and childhood, of love, loss, and remembrance. Apple, Tree is the perfect collection for anyone who has ever considered what legacies parents leave to their children. Plus, broken into twenty-five short essays, Apple, Tree is easily read in pieces: before bath-time and during nap time and while waiting in the doctor’s office.
