The Literary Mirror

Wagle's memoir opens with an inventory of absence: no wedding photographs of his grandparents, no images of an uncle who died young, nothing at all from a house fire that, it turns out, was not entirely an accident. His grandmother burned photographs after every death in the family, on a private schedule she never explained.

The book's method is interview and reconstruction — surviving relatives, a family album with visible gaps, a photo studio's ledger from the 1960s that lists sittings the family no longer has prints of. Wagle is a patient interviewer and a better one than he is a prose stylist; some chapters read like transcripts more than essays.

That roughness ends up suiting the subject. Everything My Grandmother Burned is not trying to be elegant about grief; it is trying to be accurate about it, and mostly succeeds.

“What a family chooses to burn says as much as anything it chooses to keep.”