Here is what is in eleven hundred letters written by children to a mother who is not going to get them.

Almost nothing about the mother.

That is the thing.

I had expected grief and accusation and pleading, and there is some — there is a stretch in 2013 and 2014 where Odile at fourteen and fifteen is writing things that I had to leave the room for.

But the overwhelming majority of eleven hundred letters from five girls aged seven to twenty is: a report.

What I did at school.