Revising Your Own History: The Millions Interviews Anya Yurchyshyn

Anya Yurchyshyn’s debut memoir My Dead Parents is a gut-punch, but not for the reasons you might expect. Yurchyshyn’s account runs counter to traditional narratives of loss: after a fraught childhood and adolescence, she mostly felt relief when her parents died (her father in a car accident and her mother, years later, from alcoholism). Yurchyshyn said she had “untethered” herself from her “emotionally distant and occasionally abusive” father years before, and her mother, deep in the throes of addiction and unable to care for herself, had long been a burden. But while cleaning out her childhood home, Yurchyshyn discovered a stack of documents, letters, and pictures that made her question everything she had come to believe about her family. Curious and compelled, she travelled to Wales and Ukraine in an attempt to make sense of her findings: evidence of her parents’ deep love for one another, the tragic death of a child, and even a possible murder. My Dead Parents is an unsentimental examination of grief, and a diligent account of the ways our families shape us, whether we realize it or not.

Yurchyshyn and I first met as students in the Columbia MFA program and later in Gordon Lish’s summer intensive at the Center for Fiction. We spoke on the phone about gathering up the shards of a story, writing when you don’t want to, and revising your own history.

The Millions: The blueprint for My Dead Parents was your 2013 BuzzFeed essay “How I Met My Dead Parents” (which was based on your anonymous blog of the same name). Did you always know you wanted to spend more time with this story?

At the time, it was just that essay, and of course, the blog that had preceded it. I’d always wanted it to be a