Towards the end of the second summer after I moved, I wanted to write about my experience. When I shared my account of Sandy with a fellow writer, I was asked why I had not written it as a memoir. Now, almost three years after Superstorm Sandy, I had yet to own my story. At first resisting, I concluded he was right, and switched from writing it as a dispassionate account of what happened to my mother and me, to a first-hand narrative.