Even when parents divorce, their children are allowed to keep loving both of them.

At least that is how it should be. But shortly after Dana's parents split up, her whole maternal family is cast out of her life. Traumatized but afraid to upset her father, Dana obediently goes along with this plan of erasing the past. Over time, her mother becomes a fading memory, an outline in her imagination, etched in colors. Red hair, white skin, the same blue eyes as Dana's. Unable to voice her yearning to have her mother back, or even to ask questions about her, Dana holds on to proof of her mother's existence wherever she can find it.

In this harrowing memoir, Dana makes her way through her lonely childhood and teenage years, and through her father's second marriage with the woman she is told to call mother. Dana tries to fill the emptiness left by her mother's absence, but she eventually learns that she must harness the courage to face the truth, whether or not that leads her back to her mother.