I like to think my mother looked like the artist Cindy Sherman. I see it mostly in their profiles, which match, particularly their noses. The structured, triangular form immediately conjures certain attributes: refined, poised but still subdued, and most of all, memorable. Your nose has personality, a lover once told me. I'd taken this to mean that I inherited that same distinct shape, if only because it's such a rare part of a woman's body to discuss; that mine had become the subject of pillow talk made me think I inherited something important.The first time I saw my mother in Cindy Sherman's work was in the Untitled Film Stills. These are a series of seventy black-and-white photographs the artist made early in her career, in the 1970s and 1980s. They show imaginary characters enacting scenes inspired by actual film stills and publicity shots of mid-century B- and arthouse movies without referencing any one in particular. The characters are all played by Sherman herself, outfitted in wigs and vintage clothing and makeup in varying degrees of excess. The photograph I saw my mother in first was Untitled Film Still #3 (1977). In this one, Sherman is dressed up as a housewife character and standing at a kitchen sink beside a dishrack, a bottle of Ivory soap, an empty juice jug, and a carton of salt. She is clutching her stomach, right across the center, where the tie of her apron meets the hem of her mock neck. Clutching it as if she's pregnant and unsure of what it all means for her. Or maybe clutching for her life.The most straightforward overlap between Sherman and my mother is their age difference, which was less than two years. Sherman is still living, while my mother died of breast cancer just before she turned 40. But they are both of the postwar generation. Their mothers were among the white American suburban women who were sold a homogenized, rosy femininity—that moment of return to the household after a brief, wartime professional life. It was the time of Dior's idealized, hourglass New Look dress on the cover of Vogue and the pink powder-colored aprons and shampoos and lipsticks at the local Woolworth's. My mother's mother worked part-time as a hostess at the Drake Hotel, but she still chastised my mom for going back to work once my sister and I were born—enough so that my mom quit her job as a nurse. What kind of mother chooses not to be with her children? I can imagine, though I never heard, my grandmother spouting such words. But I recall my mother slamming our kitchen phone into its plastic base on the wall enough times to know they didn't get along, and never really had. My mom was a daddy's girl, but my grandfather turned on her, too: Listen to your mother, it's for the best. His tone was always more passive but still laced with hardness. And then, she was just left with us, which, as a mom myself, I know now means its own kind of aloneness, at least when kids are so small and need so much of you that it feels like the present is eternal and suffocating. Like you'll never be your other, non-mother self again.Besides looking like my mother, the other part of Untitled Film Still #3 I always notice is a narrow, blurred object of some kind—maybe a pan in the drying rack. It points directly at Sherman's heart. But it's so close to the camera lens, it's blurred. You don't notice the object at first. Your eye thinks it should ignore it. But once you see it, it's disorienting to realize how you didn't notice it there all this time, slicing through the middle of the picture. “They were women struggling with something, but I didn't know what,” Sherman wrote of the series. I see this threatening object as the embodiment of that struggle. Trying to understand the struggle is what keeps bringing me back to these photographs, over and over again.Each Untitled Film Still is suggestive of a story surrounding the characters that doesn't exist. These women are narrative-less. Which makes me want to construct one for them. “What's great about the Film Stills is they're not so much about what you look at but they're also about what happened before and what happens after,” said artist Robert Longo, who was living with Sherman when she was working on the series and took some of the photos, since she was always in them.Because my mother died when I was so young, I have endless gaps in her story—and endless questions, about what happened before and after each image that remains in my brain. Right after she died, I had no desire to collect and archive everything I knew about her the way I do now; I didn't want to be that girl who's always crying, or, god forbid, openly weeping, a phrase I'd heard and never wanted applied to me, in all of its implied weakness and frailty. So I willed myself to forget. Now I'm left with the basic arc of her life as told to me in pieces, by my father and grandparents. She grew up in the western Chicago suburbs. She wished to be an artist. She became a lifeguard. She went to college in Kansas. She moved back to Illinois and became a nurse. Then, a stay-at-home-mom. The part that I remember is that she was working her way toward to being a nurse full-time again, just before she died.And now I know that when someone dies, the unhappy memories are sacrificed for the ones that everyone likes to talk about, repeatedly. Your mother loved swimming. Your mother was a smoker until she found out she was having you. Your mother quit her job because she loved being with you so much. These are some that I remember my father and grandparents saying most; they are reinforced by photos I saw over the years, most now reduced to mere memories themselves: my mother in a one-piece navy-blue bathing suit, treading water among the waves of a lacy pool. My mother looking down as she holds me up to blow out the candles on a cake topped with wooden blocks that spell my name. My mother in a blue and green striped polo shirt, her face frozen into what I think of as her fake smile: thin lips pressed tightly together, turned up at the edges, as if she's about to say something sarcastic, her eyes veering upward, almost about to roll, as if there's a joke being told, even though no one can tell me what it was.There is also an image of my mother that feels like a photograph but I'm pretty sure doesn't exist. It is a woman standing behind the kitchen sink, her back to us. Her hair is shoulder-length, parted down the center, bound back in a ponytail, lightly curled at the ends. Her frame is narrow, the way she liked it. She's wearing a white cable knit sweater, long khaki shorts. And above the kitchen sink, a window with airy, cream-colored curtains.The window is where my mother would watch. It is also where I picture her laughing. Where I think of her crying. I do not see her bent over the stove, even though she did all the cooking. Even though she didn't like cooking. I do not picture her sitting at the table. Perhaps this is because when I was playing outside and looked up, I would find my mother's eyes staring through the glass, narrowed, looking out somewhere beyond me and the yard and the straightlaced sidewalks. Which ignites the question of what she was looking at.The first time I saw Untitled Film Still #3 was while interning in the education department of a museum on the campus of the University of Washington, studying tours. It was the only Film Still included in an exhibition of the museum's collection that emphasized looking, called 150 Works of Art. Each work in this show was situated on its own, centered on a black metal, easel-like stand. They were organized in chronological order and scattered through a massive open gallery space, each one topped with its own glowing lightbulb. The artists who designed this display likened it to music stands in an orchestra, but as I entered the gallery, I always felt like I was descending into a constellation of art.On the tours, the gallery guide would stop in front of the small, black- and-white photograph, and the five or six people on the tour would form a tidy circle around her. All the guides always began with the same question.What do you see?There was usually a long pause before people started answering. A woman in the kitchen. Washing dishes. Thinking. She looks sad. Or concerned. Or pensive. And alone. They didn't usually say she looked like she was in a movie.I had recently learned “What do you see?” was the foundation of a technique called the Visual Thinking Strategy, or VTS. At its simplest, the goal of VTS is to teach someone how to look. It was developed by psychologist Abigail Housen and museum educator Philip Yenawine in the late 1980s, when research revealed that people visiting the MoMA left without remembering much of what they saw. It turned out that most visitors needed to be prodded toward really looking, rather than just going through the motions. Now, most museums use VTS in their tours in some form.The guide could mostly step back from the conversation after the first question, letting the responses become the art's story. They addressed egregious or erroneous claims if necessary, but that seemed rare. Questions such as the artist's biography or the historical context didn't even come up most of the time. People seemed content with what they were able to see by themselves. At the time, this made sense to me, in that it made art approachable and equitable: Preexisting knowledge wasn't required. It made complicated art feel graspable. It opened interpretations, rather than imposing a curator's particular understanding on people. But I also felt a little uneasy with the idea that a work of art could become anything I wanted it be, if I reconfigured the details in my mind just so.I find myself asking the same question—what do you see—of the images of my mother that linger in my mind. But, as I look through these details until I find one that resonates, I worry that I am making up a story that is untrue. That I am overlaying my mother's real narrative with one I've constructed. That I am turning a person into a Rorschach test, where what I am seeing says more about me than it does about her.In 2012, I flew to California to see a retrospective of Sherman's work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) that included the complete Untitled Film Stills—all seventy of them. I expected to experience some kind of revelation from witnessing them together in the flesh.When I walked into the galleries, I was taken aback by the theatrics on display—blown up, thickly saturated color photos of Sherman printed in vinyl filled the walls, like she was an actual movie star. In the art world, she certainly was a celebrity, but it wasn't how I thought of her.I was relieved to find that the Untitled Film Stills hung simply: stretched across a white wall in two lines of black, matted frames—an effect that vindicated my conviction that they were the meaty heart of Sherman's thirty-year oeuvre. Walking slowly along that long procession of images, I was stopped by Untitled Film Still #2 (1977): a woman in the bathroom, her body lightly wrapped in a towel, gazing at herself in the mirror, her fingers dangling lightly over her clavicle.What do you see? The towel; but even though it's in black and white, I see it in pink. My mother had a pink terry-cloth robe that she wore all the time and yet it never seemed like her—the flash of color in her otherwise neutral wardrobe filled with white cable-knit sweaters, eggshell polo shirts, black paper-bag shorts, crackled leather top-siders.When I was young, I thought my mother's palette was boring. I didn't know that the years Cindy Sherman and my mom grew up were during the women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, when Saint Laurent's less gendered silhouettes and a proliferation of neutral colors came back, to wash over their lives for a time. At least, until prenatal testing changed the market and everything for girls turned pink and feminine again from the moment of birth—the diapers, the blankets, the car seats, and all the Barbie and My Little Pony accessories that I remember, since the mid-1980s were when I grew up.During that time, my mom's pink robe was somehow always there for the most important moments, which I noticed because, back then, I loved pink and absorbed it into my life as much as possible. She was wearing it in the hospital room when my sister was born and I was four. When I tore the paper off my Powder Puff Pink Racer bike beside the Christmas tree, when I was five. When she couldn't get out of bed after chemotherapy, when I was seven. And she wore it the last time I saw her, when she couldn't hear me calling from the bedroom door frame, to say goodbye on my way to school. Mom, I'm leaving. Mom?But, what to do with all this pink, which doesn't feel especially trustworthy since the photos are, in fact, black and white. The texts on SFMOMA's walls seem designed to answer the easy questions and move me along—yes, there are many dimensions to women; yes, the relationship between identity and expectations is complicated; yes, Hollywood is fucked up and fucks us all up, too. This isn't enough.Later, I read that Laura Mulvey, a philosopher and film theorist, has called the experience of seeing all the Untitled Film Stills together a “phantasmagoria,” which Merriam-Webster defines in its most simple form as “a scene that constantly changes.” This sounds like what's actually happening when I am looking—certainly at the Film Stills in their progression, but even more so when I'm looking at my own memories.It's well known that our memories are changed simply by recalling them, that the idea of a memory retrieval system likened to a library is a misleading metaphor because memories aren't like physical books, fully intact and waiting to be pulled off a shelf. When we remember something, we forge new connections to old, often fragmented information in our brains, reconstructing the “memory” in the process, a process that sounds more like retelling a story and changing the details a little each time. In this sense, the scenes we remember are phantasmagoric, in that they are changing each time we revisit them.When I return to the memory of the pink robe now, as the anchor of my understanding, it becomes the center of the scenes in which it was once the background. Which feels like an invasion into my mother's carefully curated neutral palette of clothing. She would probably hate to be defined by the color pink, by the robe's soft threads unraveling along the seams, at odds with her refined, simple appearance, by its harkening back to the housewife trope that she escaped through all of the other roles she had—artist, lifeguard, nurse—until motherhood brought her back, embodied by this article of clothing that only those of us closest to her knew well. In a sense, the robe is the opposite of the kitchen window; it is the tight binding that confines and restrains her body from the window's open-ended sightlines. Both objects—the window and the robe—are at once her and not her at all.If I had to choose a favorite from the series, it would be Untitled Film Still #62 (1977). This one is nothing like the others, though I didn't realize this until I was looking at it from home, inside a book called The Complete Untitled Film Stills. As I was flipping through, I was stopped by Sherman's stare in #62, especially its direct gaze at us, the viewers. The artist is sitting on the floor in a glowing, white pleated skirt and black mock neck and black pumps, an outfit that looks more like something women wore to work in the late 1970s than in the 1950s Sherman is supposedly referencing, at least to me. Her hair is blonde and bound back in a long, straight ponytail, parted down the center. Her image is obscured by the blinding beam of studio lights that stream from behind her. In fact, there's an unusual sense of messiness to the whole picture. Cords run across the floor. The objects that surround her—a low-lying coffee table, floating newspaper pages, a cluttered desk—look less like a movie set and more like a working space for an artist making pictures of herself.Untitled #62 wasn't in the original set of Untitled Film Stills; it was one Sherman added twenty or so years later; it was forgotten for a while, buried in the outtakes of a long career, until a lost contact sheet reappeared one day, and she remembered that she'd always meant to print this one. When I see it, I wonder if I'm finally looking at “the real Cindy Sherman”—a question I've had before but had shied away from answering because, even after looking at these images for more than ten years now, I'm still not sure if it's beside the point or is the point.I've heard Sherman talk about how she is not the Untitled Film Stills characters many times. “I don't think of it as that literal to me,” she said on Art21. “When I'm doing the characters, I don't feel like it's something that grows out of my fantasy, my own dreams.” And yet, as I flip through the Untitled Film Stills book, I see Cindy Sherman; I cannot separate the two in my mind. I believe they're not a simplistic role-playing experiment, but couldn't they each be a genuine moment of her existence—couldn't she, at various times, become all of them, and none of them? It feels like the power of the images is in between the pages, in the moments we mostly don't see: when she's shrugging off one identity and transforming into the next, at will. Except for in Untitled #62, where we start to see the cracks in the performance, the behind-the-scenes moment exposed—an image she was perhaps ready to add to the series now that she's older and has lived with these photographs for so long, the way we all become more acquainted with our lives the more deeply we live inside of them. I cling to words she wrote in the book's introduction: “a lot of these characters look like me in the various periods of my life since I shot the Film Stills—perhaps unconsciously I've been following them, or at least their hairstyles. Occasionally I've felt that as I've gotten older, I've come to look like more of them.” As if the connection was there all along, buried by other stories and memories and desires that have fallen away as time has passed.In Untitled #62, I see pink again, but it's my pink this time—a color that I, like my mother, mostly banished from my own palette, beginning in middle school, and lasting until this day. I'm fine with ambers and mustards, even the occasional electric blue. Pink is the only one I've stayed away from for decades. But in this photograph, it comes back to me. This time, it is the pale carnation shade of the ballet recitals where I wore handmade tutus that sprawled around my waist like Sherman's pleated skirt. And, in the lights, I feel the heat of the stage that coated my body as I fluttered my arms in the middle of a line of girls in lavender or chartreuse or, yes, often pink, costumes, our arms banded with silver sequins, our feet as pointed as we could make them inside the cracked-leather pink slippers.And I see the next scene, too. After our dance was over, I would bow and shuffle back behind the black velvet curtain, where the line of girls dissolved into the chaos of four- or five- or six-year-olds, erupting with giggles and shrieks. And then, the volunteer-moms would descend—they were always moms—to shhh and chorale us back into a corner, a nearly impossible feat that mostly only led to more chaos. The moms’ arms were full of fabric flower stems, each tied with a pink ribbon, which they furiously handed out.And then, from somewhere within this mass of tulle and sequins and backstage shadows my own mom would suddenly appear, almost dreamlike. Her eyes fixed on me as she gently pushed past the other girls, her mouth closed but smiling in the way that I knew to be real in the way that kids do. When she reached me, one arm would wrap around my shoulder, the other would reveal a bulbous pink blossom she'd managed to save for me—the kind of mom-job that she truly loved, something that I only observed then but can fully see now, in situ among the moments of her mom life that she loved so much less—parts she must have made that sure I saw, in a way that not all mothers do. Since the flower was fake, I still have it. It's dusty and sun-bleached and resting in a shoebox in my closet, this gift that embodies both the desirable and deplorable—the two sides of the pink flower I must cling to, even as the rest of the scene fades and rebuilds and fades again every time I remember it.