My new blog is guaranteed to provide none of the following: Advice to advance your career or improve your relationships; tips to increase your net worth. It doesn't have links to designer clothes discounts. It even has a depressing topic: chronicling the year of mourning for my mother. But here’s why you might want to peek . . .

You might believe, as I do, that in some respects life is not personal, a view shared by bedfellows as strange as French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown who believed writers' "emotional stories," as she called them, made readers feel less alone. (For story ideas, she actually kept 2 binders labeled “Emo” and “Non-Emo.” True story.)

I know that what’s happened to me has happened to others—watching Alzheimer’s take my mother before she actually died, needing to unravel an intensely identified mother/daughter bond, excavating the family home to find bizarre surprises, seeking future direction in the truth of the past, all the while juggling life’s ongoing priorities; in my case, raising my daughter, managing a career and getting in a Pilates class now and then.

I hope that my efforts to investigate these experiences yield a bit of clarity, perspective, and perhaps a few good laughs to interested others. Maybe it will help some feel less alone. And so, in the spirit of Helen, this is an “Emo” story.

So that’s what’s in it for you. As for me, fueled by love of language, I believe that words change how we see the world, making things visible that weren’t visible before. So suppose I chronicle this year not only to keep my mother in my mind’s eye but also make a complex, elusive person more visible. Her impact was incalculable and my blog is an effort, fragmented though it may be, to take its measure.