This collection explores the way memory--sometimes clear, sometimes fragmented--informs the writer's understanding of herself, her family, and her sense of place. The collection celebrates my family's love for Laurence Isbell, a submariner who died in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

Describing her second book, Connecticut author Sandy Lee Carlson says: Laurence was my mother's maternal uncle who lived as a legend in my grandmother's home when I was a child. His picture sat on my grandmother's end table until long after she died.

Even as a child, I understood how losing him was unspeakably painful. The story came to me in fragments, and I have assembled them here.

Silent Spaces is a story about courage, patriotism at its finest, and a family's generations-long effort to find and honor a son, brother, uncle, friend.