Mayukh Sen

About midway through the movie Klute, as Jane Fonda, playing a young woman named Bree Daniels, mazes through a sweat-soaked club, the actor Candy Darling appears in the crowd. Pink-lemonade sunglasses frame Darling’s face; her blond locks are held by a patterned bandana. Bree, floating in a druggy haze, is surrounded by sweaty men with comb-overs. As she steps onto the dance floor, she seems relieved to spot Darling, who’s one of the few women in sight.

The musician Michelle Zauner’s mother died on October 18, 2014, a date that Zauner would have trouble remembering in the years that followed. She wasn’t quite sure why she was always forgetting it. Maybe this amnesia was her mind’s way of protecting itself. Maybe she scrubbed the detail from memory because it seemed so minute compared to all else she endured as her mother succumbed to cancer.But Zauner hasn’t been able to forget what her mother ate.