All in a Moment

Amina Agisheff walks out of a Ballard basement on a July night and does not return. Her daughter, Mallina Wilson, is fifteen, sick in bed in that basement. All in a Moment is less interested in the night itself than in the daughter who has to keep living, looking again at the childhood she survived.

Wilson does not treat the disappearance as a crime story to be followed. She begins with Nina, her grandmother, whose past stays sealed, and with Amina, whose communes left children among adults who did not keep them safe. The book first lingers over the years before Amina vanishes, so the reader already knows that childhood. Harm arrives in a child's body, wrong before it has a name. Forgiveness is her trying not to repeat those two women while raising daughters of her own. The force is a life being rebuilt.

The prose holds to objects: a coffee can for a toilet, foil on a broken antenna, Pyrex bowls from a French teacher that she eats from. She tastes the commune in her food; she says cod-liver oil is as disgusting as warm goat milk. Song lyrics open chapters and set the year; the closing pages keep returning to the same prayer about surrender, and the pace slackens, though the earlier scenes are exact enough to carry the reader through it.

Wilson writes of forgiveness as a daily practice carried into motherhood, memory, and ordinary rooms. Those rooms, more than the disappearance, are where this memoir lands. It will stay with a reader who already knows what it is to rebuild a life around an absence.