Unveiling Hidden Secrets: Marty Ross-Dolen’s Quest to Unlock a Daughter’s Haunting Truths
When Mary and Garry Myers boarded that plane in December 1960, JFK had just been elected. They were on their way from Columbus, Ohio to New York City, when they crashed, near head-on with another plane, leaving Marty’s mother, just fourteen at the time, orphaned and understandably, traumatized. Always There, Always Gone: A Daughter’s Search for Truth by Marty Ross-Dolen (She Writes Press, May 2025) is the best way to describe the visceral pain the author feels.
Told with a poet’s precision for language, and a novelist’s eye for storytelling, Ross-Dolen takes a slightly unconventional approach to this memoir, which is told in vignettes, which is such an effective frame for telling a story essentially built on the unstable bedrock of inherited trauma. Ross-Dolen takes a precise and elegant look at her grandmother’s life, in hopes to unearth the woman she was (but never met), by poring over her copious letters, postcards, photographs, and more, conjuring, in essence, an entire life. Always There, Always Gone is a lyrical, fragmented work that ultimately brings the author solace, but closure.
