It was 1973 when Pamela Marin’s mother died. It was before women walked for breast cancer, before pink ribbon campaigns, before self-examination diagrams hung in women’s showers.

“You didn’t say breast. You didn’t say cancer. You didn’t say breast cancer,” she told a crowd of about 20 at the Evanston Public Library Wednesday as she discussed her memoir “Motherland.”

It was the trend of the time, Marin said, to protect children from death. Accordingly, her mother, Mildred, kept her illness from her young daughter, opting to spend the last months of her life alone and without treatment in a Christian Science retreat in California. Pamela was 14, her brother was 16, and none of it was discussed, she said.

Fifteen years later, a dream about her mother led Marin to research her mother’s life.

“I became more and more immobilized with this funky, belated grief,” Marin said. “The more I thought about her, the more I realized I knew nothing about her.”

Thus began a year of discovery, of travelling to her mother’s birthplace in Tennessee, of visiting old players in her mother’s life. As she collected the clues and artifacts that revealed her mother’s identity, she said she began to fear them.

“(They) went in the closet and that was that,” she said. “I attached a lot of heaviness to them.”

It wasn’t until many years later, when she was writing a column about parenthood for a New York newspaper, that she really approached writing the memoir.

Marin said her research gave her a better understanding of how to raise her own children.

“Kids can handle anything,” she said. “I would rather let them. Not explaining is far more damaging. Disappearance is far more painful than contact.”

Marin father angered her. She called his actions selfish. She said he swept her mother’s death under the rug to mute his own pain, but in doing so he put his needs above those of his children. In discouraging Marin from investigating her mother, he discouraged Pamela from understanding herself, she said.

“‘Who is your mother?’ When you’re a young girl, part of that question is, ‘Who am I?'” she said.

Among the audience members sat John Reque, who taught Pamela journalism in high school in Evanston. Reque, who also taught at the Medill School of Journalism, said he enjoyed the book because it had a nice investigative quality.

“It helps when you know the person, but also know the community,” he said. “To me, that enriched the book a great deal.”

Reque lauded Pamela for speaking about the sensitive subject.

“Doing this takes a lot of courage,” he said.

Reach Jenny Song at [email protected].