WHAT THEY WERE CALLED: A Novel

Eleven women stand in a factory yard in Detroit in November of 1944. Two of them have names.Margaret Whitmore is sixty-six years old when she finds the photograph in a box that had been behind a wall for eighty years. One of the women is her grandmother. One is her grandmother's only friend. The other nine were never written down, and everyone who could have named them is dead.She decides to find out what they were called.What follows is not a mystery. It is three years of telephone calls to strangers, of parish bulletins and reverse directories and funeral registers, of a woman in Oak Park who has known Margaret's family name since before she could walk, and of a daughter in Wyandotte who says she does not want her mother back.And while Margaret is assembling the dead, her own mother is eighty-three and four hundred miles away, and has been telling the truth about her whole life to a woman nobody in the family knew existed.A novel about the records that keep the work and lose the name.