Erika Morillo Writes with Unflinching Honesty in ‘Mother Archive: A Dominican Family Memoir’

by Amaris Castillo

Erika Morillo has revisited her family history before. The Dominican-born photographer and writer did so in her photo book, All of Them, where she narrated a conversation with her disappeared father. 

But there was still more that eluded Morillo. She yearned to grasp what she described as the core story – about her upbringing, her mother, and their larger family history.

So Morillo began to write about her life in bits and pieces, until she had before her a collection of disparate notes. Those fragments came to form Mother Archive: A Dominican Family Memoir, Morillo’s forthcoming memoir about her life and the lifelong pain embedded in a turbulent relationship with her mother. 

Out on Oct. 22 from the University of Iowa Press, Mother Archive is an incredibly affecting and incisive memoir about a quest for love and the attempt to undo generations-deep damage. Morillo presents memories and family stories with unflinching honesty, intertwining them with archival family photographs, film stills, images she herself choreographed, and news clippings. And she offers her new book with the acute awareness that the ethics around writing a memoir, and about living family members, is complicated. “But I find that everybody processes pain differently,” she said recently. “Some people prefer to process in silence because it hurts too much. Others develop a certain anger and direct it towards others. In my case, I write. I make images.”

In Mother Archive readers are brought into Morillo’s difficult childhood in the Dominican Republic, where her father disappeared physically and then visually after her mother threw away photographs of him. The author then brings her readers along to New York City and Chile, where we watch as she navigates layers of trauma and abuse, and becomes a mother herself.

As a reader, one of the most striking aspects of Mother Archive for me was Morillo’s decision to structure the book as if she was speaking directly to her mother. It was both empowering and unsettling to read, and I found myself rooting for Morillo to come out stronger on the other end of her story. In one passage, the author describes receiving photos her mother sent by mail. At the time, Morillo was in the middle of moving out of NYC when she received the last photos. They were two portraits of her mother. 

“I had to decide what to do with you, and in a split second, I opted to put you in the trash. I tore the box with my house keys and undressed you out of the plastic wrapping,” Morillo writes. “Holding your gaze through the cloudy glass on the frames, it unsettled me to see how much I resemble you, even in my rejection.”

Ahead of the book’s release, Morillo spoke with the Dominican Writers Association about the decision to write this memoir, the role of photography in her life, and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.