Tully’s scrapbooks

Tully’s scrapbooks are a series of childhood books in which she records and embellishes her life for an absent mother she hopes will someday read them. They begin as a birthday present meant to occupy her, become an archive of ordinary days and imagined recognition, and end when Tully gives up on the possibility that her mother will ask to see them. Their pattern anticipates her later use of writing to preserve experience and reach the people she loves.

A Birthday Gift and an Imagined Reader

On Tully’s eleventh birthday, she waits for her mother to call or arrive, but neither happens. Among her gifts is an empty scrapbook from her grandmother, who often gives her projects to keep her busy and quiet. Tully initially imagines showing the book to her mother one day, as a way to reveal what she has missed. With few photographs of herself and only one picture of her mother, she carefully writes the date in the upper corner and begins a letter addressed to her mother.

The book therefore starts not simply as a record but as a message addressed to someone absent. Tully’s hope that the scrapbook might make her mother proud gives its blank pages an emotional purpose: they are space for a life that Tully wants to make visible.

Building a Record of Her Life

After that birthday, Tully collects school and sports pictures, movie ticket stubs, and other traces of her experiences. Whenever she has a good day, she writes about it and pastes in a receipt or ticket that can verify where she went or what she did. The books accumulate over the years; her grandmother gives her a new one each birthday, and Tully fills one after another.

As the record grows, so does Tully’s effort to shape how it will be read. She adds small embellishments, not outright lies but exaggerations intended to make her mother proud if she ever looks through the books. The scrapbooks thus preserve real events while also registering Tully’s wish to be seen in a favorable light by the parent whose attention she lacks.

Abandoning the Scrapbooks

By fourteen, Tully no longer wants to continue. She is unsure whether the change comes from developing physically ahead of her peers or from tiring of writing down a life no one has asked to see. She places the childhood books in a large cardboard box at the back of her closet and asks her grandmother not to buy any more.

Tully tells herself that she no longer cares about her mother and tries not to think about her; at school, she says her mother died in a boating accident. The boxed books mark a deliberate break from the hope that had sustained their creation. Yet the break does not end Tully’s need to communicate through writing. For three years, she writes faithfully to Kate, sharing everyday details as well as her longing for her mother’s approval. When her grandfather dies, Kate’s response allows Tully to be mostly herself rather than embellishing her account.

Writing as Memory and Connection

The scrapbooks’ purpose—keeping evidence of a life for someone else—recurs in Tully’s later writing, though the audience and circumstances change. Her ambition to become a reporter takes shape after the Mularkeys discuss Jean Enersen’s work as a woman anchoring nightly news. At the University of Washington, Tully prepares for a reporting career by studying communications, reading newspapers, and watching newscasts. The childhood books’ mixture of record and self-presentation finds a professional counterpart in her determined effort to tell stories and establish herself.

The book also places Tully’s scrapbooks within a wider pattern of writing as a way to preserve relationships and experience. During the war, Kate receives Johnny’s letter from Baghdad, which describes the journalists’ situation at the Al-Rashid Hotel and his plans to leave the city. Much later, Kate begins writing in her journal when she is unsure where to start, turning to the page to address her fears and her relationships with Johnny and Marah. In a later journal entry, she reflects that a life story is not ultimately remembered as a timeline of successes and failures, but through love, family, and laughter. These later records echo the childhood scrapbook’s impulse while shifting its emphasis: what matters is not only proof of what happened, but the human bonds that give memory meaning.