In this stunning debut, Doc McLemore delivers a page-turning narrative that turns on the intricacies  of personal and family memory. A forthright and incisive honesty informs McLemore’s profound insights, chiseled forensically from the stone of familial lore and the aftermath of failed relationships. This is a book about what it’s like to love someone who goes missing and how to forge a self from, as Whitman puts it, “what deepest remains.” Be prepared to read this book, feel completely satisfied, and go back to read it again. 

—Kim Dana Kupperman, series editor, The Best American Essays

Doc McLemore's riveting debut isn't just a haunting portrait of mental illness, violence, addiction, complex love, forgiveness, and the half-truths and half-lies families sculpt into myth, though it's all of those things and more. It's also an unsparing story of self-discovery and meditation on identity, on the limits of understanding our own pasts, and, by extension, our own selves. But mostly, it's a thrilling family memoir that's impossible to put down.

— Jon Bernstein, author of What Do You Do When You're Lonesome: The Authorized Biography of Justin Townes Earle

Someday We Won't Remember This is a promethean debut of excoriating empathy. McLemore's incisive prose makes each moment of dejection as luminous as a recent dream--our own small fists on the tailgate as we cry "That's my daddy!" As the cigarette smoke fills the room around you, you'll know this is how memoir ought to be written.

— Wes Jamison, author of My Corpse Inside and Carrion

In their propulsive debut, Someday, We Won’t Remember This, Doc McLemore maps and crawls into the fault lines of memory, excavating personal and cultural trauma. Their relentless investigation reads as a game of telephone whose original message is the answer to “Why am I who I am?” Legal briefs, institutional records, photos, and letters render a portrait of a father, both magnetic and terrifying, whose “love was my first withdrawal.” By turns deadpan, lyrical, and devastatingly direct in its indictment of family, of perpetrator, and of self, it’s Fleabag meets Clue meets Dorothy Allison. I’m thankful for this book, which reminds us that healing brings as many questions as it does answers. 

—Justin Wymer, author of Let the Forest Go: Poems

Haunted by family secrets, painful histories, and tragic cycles of violent love, Doc McLemore writes fiercely and compassionately with a promise that the only way out of darkness is to chase the truth. A stunning, rich, and humane debut that reminds us that the stories our parents tell us are living, ever-changing, and never too far from the urgent present. 

— Jon Corcoran, author of The Rope Swing and No Son of Mine

Doc McLemore’s memoir is a kaleidoscopic autopsy that both undoes and makes whole. With the observance only an artist turned scientist can exact, they turn over their life, family history, and place in a larger story. McLemore is gentle, vulnerable, and unrelenting, balancing the precision of a scalpel and the courage and compassion of a love letter that’s also a Dear John. This is the kind of voice that makes sense in a world with no absolutes. This is the kind of memoir that matters. It beats like a drum in your chest.

—Gina Warren, author, Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement

Someday We Won’t Remember This captures the wake left by an absent father—shaped as much by forces beyond his control as by those within it. It traces the gravity of family bonds and the ways they shape the stories we struggle to claim as our own. Deeply personal and unflinching, it moves between fact and fiction to show how unreliable—and necessary—both can be.

—Raymond Thompson Jr., author of Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster

Doc McLemore examines complex family dynamics and the never-ending process of healing their own psychological trauma through storytelling. Someday We Won't Remember This manages to explore uniquely heartbreaking situations in a relatable way for anyone touched by grief, addiction, abuse, or self-sabotage.

— Heather Cazad, CEO Cazad Events

Someday We Won’t Remember This is a testament to a fearsome kind of honesty, one that relentlessly seeks for truth and just as relentlessly accepts the impossibility of finding more than shards of it. In its interrogation of traumas at the hands of loved ones, it explores how to keep moving forward, not so much past the harms but rather with them in new, hopefully healthier, ways. As such, the book is both deeply unsettling (in the way we all sometimes need to be unsettled) and deeply inspiring.

— Em Kightley

“The story of my life didn’t start with my birth,” writes Doc McLemore in their searing debut, a memoir that troubles the boundaries and traditions of the genre, asking the impossible questions that aim to tell that very story. Part family history, part reflection on identity and memory, Someday We Won’t Remember This offers a unique and compelling portrait of the legacies of the people who made us. Ambitious, harrowing, and at times even humorous, McLemore’s work demands that we expand our definition of Truth, arriving at something far more meaningful along the way.

— Kristi D. Osorio, author of The Sound of Burning: A Mother, A Daughter, A Murder

A riveting investigation of truth and testimony, Doc McLemore’s Someday We Won’t Remember This pieces together a family portrait defined by trauma and dysfunction and devoid of clear protagonists or easy alliances. In place of a neat storyline, McLemore presents a set of competing mythologies based on court documents, photographs, hospital records, and phone calls—all of which raise more questions than answers about the enigmatic father who still haunts McLemore’s memory and wonder, casing a long shadow on one writer’s ongoing search for self and identity.

–Rachael Peckham, author of Alight: Flights of Prose