It's hard to imagine that our parents had lives and told us lies even before we were born. As we ourselves age, the gap widens between what we think we know about them and who they actually are/were. It's a concept carefully explored in Nita Noveno's new memoir, Mud on the Moon (Red Hen Press; 224 pages), which traces the author’s relationship with her elderly father, Benito, and the different ways she uncovers details about a man she didn't know as well as she initially thought.

The book moves through time and perspective in a nonlinear way. It opens with Benito's journey to America, arriving in San Francisco in 1928, then shifts to Nita in the salmon cannery following her first year of college. We see her father's first impressions of his new country and his early sense of being unwanted. At the same time, adult Nita tries to connect her own experiences as both an insider and an outsider to his life as an immigrant.

Now pause.

Because what we read about Benito's early years and his journey to America isn't exactly true. The stories told by Noveno of her father's arrival in America and initial impressions exist in the book, but as we find out, that's not how it happened in real life.

After the first chapter, which details how 21-year-old Benito left his village in the Philippines and boarded a passenger ship to America as a stowaway, the author breaks the fourth wall in a letter to the reader, explaining that her father's journey, as she wrote it, is fiction. Using a ship's manifest she found online, she discovered that her father came to America as a registered passenger, not a stowaway, and arrived in Seattle, not San Francisco. She kept the fictionalized version because of what it represented, not just for her father, but for all Filipino immigrants in that period. She writes that "this story had come to symbolize for me the challenge, the exhaustion, and the terror of immigrants like my father in their passage to the new world, and the risks that they would take to chase after opportunities."

That interruption establishes the book's intention. Rather than offer a straightforward historical memoir about self-identity and her father's immigrant story, Noveno presents a hybrid memoir in which some parts of her father's story are factual, and others are imagined. All memoirs blend truth and embellishment; the balance varies and is often shaped by how they're marketed. Moving too close to fiction without disclosure can lead to controversy (as we've seen with myriad public examples, with Raynor Winn's 2018 memoir, The Salt Path, perhaps the most recent). Sticking strictly to fact can make a memoir boring (as we've seen with far too many examples to list).

Here, Noveno takes a different approach, telling us directly what's true and what's imagined. These letters to the reader continue throughout the book, each time clarifying the information presented and often explaining what is fact and what is not. This inventive technique serves several purposes. In some places, Noveno fills in gaps in her father's life with fiction, or at least her best approximation of what happened, because she has no way of knowing the truth. At other times, particularly in early sections of her father's life that detail the changing landscape Filipino immigrants faced in the United States during the Great Depression and World War II, Noveno writes his story to represent universal experiences and struggles of these immigrants as a whole.

Being upfront with the reader doesn't weaken the book's strength or blunt its emotional impact. Instead, it reinforces the book's central method, and the author deserves credit for introducing it. In one of the book's most emotional stories, Noveno writes about her father's last solo trip to his hometown in the Philippines. In Alaska, his doctor had put him on a no-salt diet due to mounting health issues. But in a tender moment, back in his hometown, he gets to savor a meal with his favorite shrimp paste. It's a touching way to show a man preparing to say goodbye to his life, and remembering the small things from his past that he loves. Also, as Noveno immediately tells us, it couldn't have happened. None of it. The reality of the health problems was too great. But the author wanted to give him a final story he didn't get in real life. Knowing that doesn't temper the impact or make us question why she did it. Instead, we appreciate what it represents.

The book's highlight is how Noveno assembles her father's past piece by piece, and we get a sense of putting the puzzle together along with her. We also feel her frustration at times, as she notes, "Each time I hold up a magnifying glass in search of my father's life, I see more blank spaces." Clues often come as small pieces of media, some expected and some not. For example, Noveno describes a random moment from the past she knew about and can go back to see: Benito appearing as an extra in one scene of the 1950s noir film Cry Vengeance. At a traveling photography exhibit on early Filipino immigrants, she sees a photograph of a group of people standing with a visiting Filipino military commander in Fresno in 1944 and is certain one of the men is her father (her sister believes it too). And near the end, she includes a collection of photographs her father took and adds fictional captions based on the voice she hears in her head. It's a wonderful representation of how people live after they die, not just in our thoughts, but in media left behind.

Though Benito is the focus of the book, half of the chapters are from Noveno's perspective as she tries to learn more about her father, interpret information told to her by others, and present her father's experiences in the context of her own life. She weaves together several threads between her own experiences and Benito's, from working in the salmon canneries to living in a foreign country. Other threads dangle, as not all of the personal relationships in Noveno's life are tied up and explained. It reflects a choice to keep the focus on her father and uncover his past, but the result is that other sections of the book feel disjointed, unnecessary, or under-explored. How well we can move past these and keep the focus on Benito dictates how much that matters.

Trying to piece together the past of a lost family member through fragments of memory and media is difficult. In Mud on the Moon, Noveno writes stories for her father to fill the empty spaces in his life. As she tells us in one letter, "What history doesn't provide us, perhaps dreams and imagination can." It's a touching way to close the gaps in a parent's history and adds to the memoir's rich media mosaic. Though not all of its narrative lines tie together neatly at the end, the book hits plenty of emotional highs. It deserves credit for finding a new way to tell a story, particularly one that will resonate strongly with readers who have also been left wondering about the past lives of their loved ones after they're gone.