In a collection of short stories, Kevin Moffett explores how what we remember is shaped by our past and how it shapes our future. In the title story, a father and son each search to make meaning out of their relationship writing short stories about their past. Son Frederick has set aside his writing for a while when his father begins submitting stories using his full name, also Frederick, stories so similar in tone and theme that the young Frederick’s girlfriend thinks they are his. As father and son use their writing to make sense of their pasts together, they are able to come to a tacit agreement about their present and their future. Moffett’s situations are familiar to all of us even though the specifics may not be, for how many people have ever debated searching for the crown they have swallowed after passing it rather than paying to replace it, as an Estonian amusement park worker does, but how many of us have gone through things we thought unthinkable so as not to have to replace the familiar and comfortable. A young couple’s honeymoon is interrupted when a snake rots in the wheel well of the car they are driving cross country and they must begin their new life in the barren deserts of Arizona with an unfamiliar, smelly vehicle whose impatient owner is waiting for its return in Florida. The stories are well executed and sometimes make us flinch as we recognize ourselves in places we don’t want to.
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