I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.

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March 1, 2026: Erika J. Simpson

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“Imagine this is your mother”  is the powerful first line of Erika J. Simpson’s debut memoir This Is Your Mother.

Imagine this is your mother. Sallie Carol. Daughter of sharecroppers. Middle of ten. She’s a June Gemini, inquisitive and playful, so sensitive she cries before the switch reaches her legs. She pretends to be the teacher in games of schoolhouse, leads the neighborhood kids on adventures along the creek, and most of all she yearns for a life beyond the fields of North Carolina.

This first chapter, called “Genesis,” continues for only two and a half pages and spirits the reader from Sallie Carol’s childhood to Erika’s departure for college. When we turn the page to the next chapter, it’s a couple of decades later, August of 2013, and Sallie Carol’s cancer is back. The doctors give her two months to live.

In This is Your Mother, two timelines move us forward. In one, Erika is a child growing up in Atlanta with her mother who is trying to make ends meet (and often they don’t), and in the other, Erika is an adult working in Chicago with her mother dying in Atlanta. Erika is creative with structure and form, using second person, lists, transcriptions, short screenplays, a TV game show, and scripture. This memoir is alive on the page.

While Mama studied her Bible, I studied her, making scriptures from the ways she kept us afloat. Book of Sallie Carol 1:2: The only things that matter, and the order of their importance, are food and rent. Don’t pay no bill before you’ve eaten. Because how you look sitting around with all the lights on but nothing to eat?

Erika’s descriptions are substantive and pop with freshness.

Eighties food stamp money: “Oranges and pinks loud enough to be heard. Bright enough to tell everybody in line behind you that you’re on government aid and your daddy left your mama for a white woman …”
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A bus stop: “We ran across the parking lot like the roaches scattering out, heading toward a bus stop that wouldn’t make a comment on our lives.”

Love is everywhere. While her mother’s in jail for writing a bad check for a car, Erika lives in North Carolina with her aunt who has “a house phone normal kids could call.” After almost a year, Erika’s mother comes to get her.

It was spaghetti night. Mama spoke cordial at the table. I felt weird being witnessed this normal, like I lived in the house and Mama lived outside it. I wanted Mama and me to have an inside, but I also didn’t mind being on the outside with her.

In addition to love, this memoir is full of truth, and the humor in truth. Erika refers to the fact that her mother’s cancer is back as “the health reveal.” At one point, when Erika’s cell phone buzzes, she puts it under her pillow and breathes slowly as if she’s asleep, “putting on an act for a woman who’s thousands of miles away.”

Strong sentences bind this book together and add to its heft.

Mama did it wrong, the Great Migration. She went deeper south, instead of north…

The end of October was for pretending life was normal.

You can’t tell if she’s freaking out. But you can’t tell if you are either.

When trying to decide whether she can afford to go visit her mother, Erika writes, “If you wait much longer, it won’t be that you can’t but that you didn’t.”

I’m not going to tell you how the memoir ends. I want to, but I’m not. I will tell you that I loved the ending. Don’t miss this wonderful book. Imagine this is your mother.

Sallie Carol “usually comes over the hill with her suitcase and her cane looking mad as hell.”

Erika was born in North Carolina, grew up in Atlanta, and now lives in Denver, Colorado, with her partner and their black cat. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kentucky and is the recipient of the 2021 MFA Award in Nonfiction. Her essay “If You Ever Find Yourself” was published in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity and featured in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee. She also writes fiction for the page and screen. When meeting with potential publishers for her memoir, she made sure to ask each editor for their Zodiac sign.

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Come back on MARCH 1st to read how ERIKA J. SIMPSON spends her days.