A: Being a psychiatrist informs so much of how I see the world and helps me understand human behavior from many angles. I’m sure the ways I perceive both my mother’s and my own childhoods are largely through a psychiatrist’s lens. But at the same time, it’s very hard to take the child out of her childhood, and most of the memories I write about in the book are from times long before I studied psychiatry. So even though I might be able to interpret feelings and behaviors in a clinical way from a distance now, I still have the same visceral reactions to memories that anyone might have. Regarding my mother’s childhood, I find great value in understanding how grief and trauma were perceived and managed at that time in human history. It was a very different time from today, and people were handling overwhelming situations in the best ways they knew how. Finally, being a mother myself has been its own invaluable education. So I would say it is a combination of my training in psychiatry and my study of history plus my own experience as a mother that have helped me understand my mother’s grief and heal my own in the process.