This brief but intense series of sketches about the life of the author's mother, while specific, is, nonetheless, essentially a meditation on the nature of memory. Frederick Wemyss reflects on things his mother told him, things she didn't, and things he saw her go through. At times humorous, at times solemn, Things That Happened To My Mother is a portrait in pieces, assembled in a collapsing meshwork of memory. It is a broken doll of a book.