In the months after my mother died, I was tasked with cleaning out her house, my childhood home, which had always been a cramped testament to my parents' wanderlust and curiosity. There was no television in our living room, but there was an African statue or mask in every corner, Iranian kilims, Indonesian textiles, Japanese kimonos hanging off every wall, and shelves that literally overflowed with art books and foreign trinkets. People often wandered through our house with their mouths hanging open, examining every sword, carved horn, or meditation bowl they could reach.

When my father died, our home started dying as well, and by the time my mother passed away, the treasured rugs were being eaten by moths and mice, the fire escape was dangling off the back of the house, and some windows wouldn't open while others wouldn't close. Everything that once seemed special was chipped and cracked, buried under a sticky coat of dust.

I began my work in my mother's study, which had become a haphazard storage room for everything from mismatched shoes to years of unopened mail. I spent days bagging sweaters for Goodwill and organizing the incredible amount of clip-on earrings and pantyhose she'd purchased from Filene's Basement decades before and never worn. I'd anticipated this chore for years, and though it was surreal to finally be doing it, it was also calming.

Once I moved beyond her clothes and crappy jewelry, I got into her more personal belongings, her file cabinets, battered shoe boxes stuffed with papers, and trunks full of undated slides and photographs that my father, an accomplished photographer, left behind years ago. This was quiet, intimate territory, and I didn't know how to approach or navigate it. I certainly wasn't prepared for what I would soon discover: that in the bundles of faded telegrams, handwritten love letters, old faxes, and diaries abandoned after only a few pages, my mother had left me a window into both of my parents and their complicated marriage. Even a superficial scan of these artifacts revealed that my parents had an entirely different relationship than I'd assumed, and were, in many ways, profoundly different people than I'd long ago decided they were.

For days I sat in my mother's filthy study, surrounded by the relics of my parents' love, trying to take in their lives and thinking, I don't know these people at all. And for the first time, I wanted to.

I packed a box of the juiciest things I could find and brought it back with me to Brooklyn. I sat in my apartment and read the letters my father wrote to my mother over 40 years ago, and I imagined him hunched over his typewriter, sweating over his words, and thought of how special it must have felt for her to receive those letters from hundreds and often thousands of miles away, and then going to her own typewriter and writing him back. It was strange to hold things that they'd both held, delicate, wrinkled pieces of paper where they chronicled their love and adventures before sending them off so they could be connected even when they were across the world.

As I began to excavate their lives and search for what was hidden within everything they'd left behind, it was impossible not to think of how easy it would be for someone to piece together my life — all they'd need to do is hack my email. They'd have instant access to my hopes, my loves, my frustrations, every event chronicled in detail to my friends. There would be no mysteries, nothing to explore that I hadn't explored myself and articulated five different ways to five different people. It would be an easy task, and probably a boring one, and there wouldn't be anything to actually touch or hold.

Going through my parents' stuff didn't make me suddenly miss them, but I became more intrigued by them every day. I wanted to know more and more about them, to solve their mysteries. At the same time, I felt a corresponding, if conflicting, urge to speak, or write, about what many people seemed to think was unspeakable: my ever-present lack of grief. So I decided to combine these seemingly divergent impulses into an Tumblr blog called My Dead Parents, which I kept anonymous both out of respect for my family and because, after years of writing fiction, I wasn't sure if I could handle revealing so much about myself in writing. I didn't have a nonfiction writer's courage to publicly own my feelings and experiences, even though I knew, or hoped, they were important.

When I began My Dead Parents, I thought my biggest struggle would be the availability of information, because there were only so many letters, photographs, and memories. But actually, I was lucky to have as much as I did, so that wasn't the problem, not remotely. The problem was what I was doing with all the information I had.

I knew, or thought I knew, that if I wanted to understand my mother and father, to know them as I probably never could have in life, I actually had to be open to learning new things about them, to seeing them from a completely different perspective — how they saw themselves, how others saw them, or simply taking them in through their words or pictures without reading my narrative into whatever was sitting in my lap. I quickly realized that I was deeply welded to my ideas about them and their roles in my life. Whenever I encountered information that contradicted what I'd already decided was the truth, my brain hardened. Every cell in my body said, "Nope." So in the beginning, I would post some of their letters and photos, which was and remains one of my favorite parts of the project, but mostly what I did was talk about myself and my experience of my parents: that my parents were always unhappy, my father was mean, they fucked me up. I talked about me. But what I was really doing was defending the story I'd arrived with against mounting counter-evidence — and losing.