There are a thousand truisms about home and childhood, none of them true but all of them honest.

It’s natural to want to tidy those earliest memories into a story so palatable and simple that you never have to read again. A home video promises to give your memories back with a certificate of fact— but the footage isn’t the feeling. Who is just out of frame? What does the soft focus obscure? How did the recording itself change the scene? Some scrutinize the past and some never look back and Lucy Dacus, a lifelong writer and close reader, has long been the former sort.

“The past doesn’t change. Even if a memory is of a time I didn’t feel safe, there’s safety in looking at it, in its stability.” — Dacus