Dog Flowers

A Memoir

By: Danielle Geller

Narrated by: Charley Flyte

A daughter returns home to the Navajo reservation to retrace her mother’s life in a memoir that is both a narrative and an archive of one family’s troubled history

“An honest, intimate, and heart-wrenching memoir that explores the fractured family, the damaging effects of alcoholism and poverty, and what it means to seek healing from the legacies of trauma.” (Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of the National Book Award finalist Sabrina & Corina)

When Danielle Geller’s mother dies of alcohol withdrawal during an attempt to get sober, Geller returns to Florida and finds her mother’s life packed into eight suitcases. Most were filled with clothes, except for the last one, which contained diaries, photos, and letters, a few undeveloped disposable cameras, dried sage, jewelry, and the bandana her mother wore on days she skipped a hair wash.

Geller, an archivist and a writer, uses these pieces of her mother’s life to try and understand her mother’s relationship to home, and their shared need to leave it. Geller embarks on a journey where she confronts her family's history and the decisions that she herself had been forced to make while growing up, a journey that will end at her mother's home: the Navajo reservation.

Dog Flowers is an arresting memoir that examines mothers and mothering, sisters and caretaking, and colonized bodies. Exploring loss and inheritance, beauty and balance, Danielle Geller pays homage to our pasts, traditions, and heritage, to the families we are given and the families we choose.

This audiobook includes a PDF containing images from the book.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Danielle Geller (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"This shattering memoir...combines image and text to reveal a portrait of home.” (Elle)

“A candid and achingly fractured memoir of [Danielle Geller’s] mother, her family, her Navajo heritage and her own journey to self-discovery and acceptance.” (Ms.)

“Dog Flowers by Danielle Geller is a journey story we’ve never read before. Geller travels through snippets of her own life and that of her mother’s, creating a narrative where all roads lead to her mother’s home in the Navajo Nation. It’s an honest, intimate, and heart-wrenching memoir that explores fractured family, the damaging effects of alcoholism and poverty, and what it means to seek healing from legacies of trauma. This book gave me chills. Trained as a librarian and archivist, Geller has created a type of archive, a living collection of memories and documents that speak to a life that is at once precisely individualistic while also being universally resonant. Read this book.” (Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina)

“A Navajo woman’s memoir of family, loss, and self-discovery. [Danielle Geller] takes readers on two parallel journeys: that of her mother, Laureen, who left the Navajo reservation at age 19, 'almost as soon as she could', and her own, which begins with her notifying her sister Eileen that their mother was dying.... After Laureen’s death, Geller collected her mother’s belongings, 'packed into eight suitcases' and including 'her diaries, her photos, and the letters she kept'. Using these personal items, the author expertly weaves her story into Laureen’s.... Geller’s mix of archival research and personal memoir allows readers to see a refreshing variety of perspectives and layers, resulting in an eye-opening, moving narrative. A deftly rendered, powerful story of family, grief, and the search for self.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

Amazingly haunting

I Love this book so much. It’s truly poetry in prose. A true modern masterpiece

A great book

Very easy read! It flowed smoothly and was super easy to listen to with out getting lost… loved the truthfulness and sharing of the authors life story

Navajo culture

I loved it. I appreciate this story so much. I can identify with the story teller. Living in two worlds.