All of us have probably wondered at one time or another about our parents’ identities before they were our parents. The yellowing photo albums from before I was born leave me wondering, who are these young, bell-bottomed people? Where is this tiny apartment where they hung macramé and laughed at something just off camera? Who are these people who are my parents, yet not my parents? I remember the thrill of rifling through drawers and files as a child, hoping to find something shocking about my otherwise ordinary midwestern family. Something I was too young to know, a family secret or astounding scandal from which I needed protection.

I never found anything.

Judy Bolton-Fasman, though, knows from an early age that there are real mysteries to be uncovered in her family, and her book, Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets, recounts her lifelong quest to figure them out.

She begins in the prologue with an astounding experience that haunts and trails her through her adult life, and it establishes her father as the central mystery of the book. When she is a young graduate student, Bolton-Fasman receives a thick envelope in the mail from her father, the biggest enigma she knows. Before she’s even had time to imagine the revelations it contains, she finds a panicked message from her father on her answering machine. He tells her to burn the envelope immediately. Reluctantly, certain that she’s giving up the key to so many unknowns, she follows his directive, watching the paper, and the answers to her questions, turn to ash.

This moment isn’t the only origin of Bolton-Fasman’s mystery, though. In her childhood, she accepts her namesake and doppelganger as “Judy Bolton, Girl Detective,” the heroine of a series of novels popular in the 1930s and 40s. Each chapter of Asylum peels back another layer of her sleuthing, with the author moving deftly back and forth in time to reveal the complexities and volatility of her childhood, but also the ripples that carry over into her adult life and her understanding of her own identity. Of her upbringing on Asylum Avenue, a street whose name connotes the disarray of her childhood, she says, “I always knew, or at least believed, that something was missing, or wrong. Something unspoken. My parents were an accumulation of random details that mostly pointed in diverging directions: culture, nationality, age. They were of two worlds; therefore, I was of two worlds. Their union made them unique and, ultimately, incomprehensible. Like the household budget, their stories never added up.”

Having burned the letter that she believes may have solved the mysteries once and for all, Bolton-Fasman takes her readers on a winding and fascinating road through her life and the lives of her family members, and she allows us to join her as each new discovery invites yet another question, another door, another path. Asylum is a memoir threaded with secrets, contradictions, and prismatic family stories where the light bounces back at a different angle every time you look just a little closer.

For instance, we see Bolton-Fasman’s parents through the lens of what she knows: They married when her mother, Mathilde Alboukrek, was in her twenties, newly arrived from Cuba and seeking a glamorous American life, and after her father, K. Harold Bolton, nearly twenty years Mathilde’s senior, had already lived an entirely different life, one where he attended Yale and served in the Navy during World War II. Bolton-Fasman describes her father as a staunch patriot who prides himself on his American identity, hosting barbeques, delighting in John Philip Sousa marches, and insisting on “English only” for a cousin-in-law who immigrates to the US from Cuba. The Boltons’ family home in Hartford, Connecticut, is a quintessential suburban dream for Mathilde, its built-in vacuum cleaner a status symbol. This pretty picture, though, is also a threadbare façade hiding a marriage continually disrupted by Mathilde’s unpredictable mood swings and Harold’s drinking and angry outbursts.

Asylum is driven most forcefully, though, by what Bolton-Fasman doesn’t know, and the yawning gap between her parents’ ages is a place where the mystery begins to unfold for her: what was her father doing before he met her mother? The stories are vague and blurry, or absent altogether. “Silence surrounded my father like a force field,” she laments. Her questions take her to an astonishing array of places. After her father’s death from Parkinson’s, the author prays the Kaddish, a Jewish prayer ritual signifying remembrance and mourning, three times a day for eleven months in an effort to find her way into a deeper understanding of him. Among many other pursuits, she uses psychic mediums as a way to ask questions about his secrets and the possibility that she might have a half-sister in Guatemala; she pleads with her father’s aging friends and acquaintances to get information about his possible involvement as a CIA agent stopping the spread of communism in Latin America.

Bolton-Fasman’s writing shines in its details: The image of her father carefully teaching young Judy to position her violin under her chin, juxtaposed with an image of him later in life, addled with Parkinson’s, “shakily conducting Gilbert and Sullivan from his recliner, scratched-up records playing music loudly on the old turntable.” Or the image of her mother dancing alone in the living room, “with one hand on her stomach, the other raised in the air as if taking an oath . . . . It was in the swing of her hips, the sweetness of her song. She danced as if she were the only Cubana left in the world.”

Asylum is a memoir that pulses with beautifully recalled imagery and propulsive intrigue. Bolton-Fasman depicts a family yearning for things they don’t have—a glamorous life, a perfect marriage and family, the thrill of travel and exotic places, or in the author’s case, the answers about her parents’ past that so often seem to evade her grasp. I found, though, that “Judy Bolton, Girl Detective” is also searching for herself in all this, and isn’t that the mystery we all seek to uncover? It is from her yearning to expose and understand the voids and secrets of her parents’ lives that a firmer sense of her own identity emerges, offering her a sort of asylum that can come only from having made the journey.