In her novel, We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Oates reflects on families:“Always it seemed, hard as I tried I could never hope to catch up with all their good times, secrets, jokes—their memories. What is a family, after all except memories?—haphazard and precious as the contents of a catchall drawer in the kitchen (called the ‘junk drawer’ in our household, for good reason)….
“For the Mulvaneys were a family in which everything that happened to them was precious and everything that was precious was stored in memory and everyone had a history.”
Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys (New York: Plume, 1997), 4, 5.
Image: “Precious as the contents of a catchall drawer in the kitchen.”