Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined

The photographic memoir usually runs on found material: old snapshots, letters, the grainy evidence a family actually left behind. Cherry Hill throws that convention out. Jona Frank rebuilt her 1970s New Jersey childhood from scratch on sets, cast actors to play the people in it, and hired Laura Dern to play her mother. The result sits somewhere between a photo book, a memoir, and a film that was never shot, and where you land on it depends on how much artifice you can forgive in the service of truth.

Take the recurring image of the mother, played by Dern, immaculate and cold in a spotless suburban kitchen, the girl hovering at the frame's edge waiting for a warmth that is clearly not coming. It is staged to the millimeter, lit like a period film, art-directed down to the Formica. And it works, because the artifice mirrors the subject: a household run as a performance of normalcy, a childhood spent reading a parent's face for weather.

The logic of the conceit is stronger than it first sounds. Memory is already a reconstruction, already lit and cast and edited by the person doing the remembering, so building it physically on a set only makes that process visible. Frank is not claiming these rooms are real. She is claiming this is how they feel in recollection, which is a different and sometimes more honest kind of accuracy.

Her background is in typological portraiture, and it shows in the control. Every frame is composed with the flat, deliberate attention of someone used to making strangers hold still and give themselves away. The child actor is directed with genuine tenderness; the domestic sets carry the specific dread of a place where the furniture is nicer than the feelings. As directed portraiture and production design, the book is a controlled, exact piece of work.

The cost of the method is intimacy. Watching accomplished actors, one of them a movie star, stand in for a real mother and a real child sets a pane of glass between the viewer and the wound. Perfection has a temperature. The more polished the tableau, the more it can read as an exercise, admirable and a little airless, and there are stretches where the concept is doing more work than the feeling, where you register the cleverness of the staging before, or instead of, the ache it is meant to carry.

The text carries weight the images cannot. Frank's writing about a mentally ill brother and a mother who withheld love supplies the biography the tableaux can only gesture at, and the book is strongest where word and picture split the labor, prose holding the facts, images holding the atmosphere. Read whole, the two channels cover for each other's limits.

Return to the bargain the method proposes: a conventional memoir would have handed you the actual faded snapshot of that kitchen and asked you to feel something. Cherry Hill hands you a flawless reconstruction and asks whether the feeling survives the upgrade. For some readers it will not; the built version is too clean to bleed. For others, the very perfection is the point, the airless beauty of a home where everything looked right and nothing was. The book earns its risk about half the time, which, for a gamble this large, is not a poor rate.