Having just lost their mother, three siblings do their best to preserve her memory even as they deal with unsympathetic adults determined to force change into their lives.

On the brink of death, an elderly man recounts his life to his great grandson, revealing that his mother's schizophrenic delusions of an otherworldly fantasy land were no delusions at all.

In San Francisco, a Chinese grandmother teaches her granddaughter how to pickle the memories she no longer wants to carry with her, much to her daughter’s chagrin.

A young boy, who is still unaware of his future in which his mother dies and he becomes a miserable, unaccomplished middle-aged man, lives through an ever-so-slightly unusual day which would later become the one and only core memory he has of his mother.

A son tells a series of stories, most of them about his father and stepfather. As the son describes a robbery that took place at his house in high school and his experiences with his father, a former Jehovah's Witness and current alcoholic, he begins to recall details from his childhood.

An encounter with a little boy and his abusive mother at an airport causes an old woman to reflect upon her relationship with her children and her late, depressive, and abusive ex-husband.

A son takes his aging mother back on a visit to his childhood home. Though he expected the house to remain at least a little bit familiar, both his fromer home and his mother had changed considerably with the passing of time.

After a ten-year-old boy joins his parents in bidding his grandfather farewell as he leaves New York for Germany, he experiences the first major loss of his youth and struggles to understand the complexity of the experience.

When a mother's memory begins to deteriorate, her daughter catalogs her memories, both the ones she does and doesn't remember.

A rambunctious teenager with an inquisitive mind causes much grief for all his New England family and neighbors when he visits them in the summer of 1914, on the eve of World War I.