“Colleen Brown has found a new way to approach memoir. Her method attends to sharp, intact memories that have inexplicably remained with her, while resisting the temptation to fabricate forgotten or unwitnessed events. The result is an account that enacts the loss she knows as a person rendered motherless at a young age. Her narrative accepts the fact that aspects of the family story will remain obscure while other parts are indelible. The beauty of this writing is that there is no exploitation of emotion here. The author takes possession of her shards of memory and polished them into poetry.”–Liz Magor
Available for pre-order now and for sale October 3, 2023 wherever books are sold— Colleen’s memior offers an absorbing, eye-opening, and heart-wrenching account of her mother’s life in fragments, conversations, and memories. It's being hailed as a must-read for everyone who has found themselves questioning the implications of true crime sensationalism on the lives of victims and families—and an especially crucial read for people who've never considered these implications at all.
More about the book:
While in the middle of a divorce and in the process of reinventing herself, Doris Brown died suddenly in 1974. Two years later, a serial killer confessed to her murder. What propels this book is a desire to recover Doris' life, which has been obscured by the spectacle of her death. If you lie down in a field, she will find you there captures the cadence of family stories collected through interviews the author conducted with her siblings. Essays and memories by Doris Brown's youngest children, Colleen and Laura, appear alongside spoken word anecdotes that contain the family's oral history and tell us who she was.
Additional praise for If you lie down in a field, she will find you there:
“If You Lie Down is, to my mind, the finest debut since Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries: A Memoir and ranks with Annie Ernaux’s The Years as a life-changing event.” —Michael Turner
“There is a stunning urgency in this work. If you lie down, feels, at first, like a conversation with a friend, but lands with the brutality of human wholeness.” –Johnny D Trinh