Written by KM Kramer
CRISPR technology lets us edit genes—targeting DNA at precise locations to replace harmful genes or limit their expression. It’s a relief, frankly, to know we have new tools to prevent a feared genetic destiny.
My entire life I have wanted a tool like this: to prevent becoming my mother. To stop me, if I start to replicate her nature or her nurture.
I suspect I will need to get down to the very threads of our shared DNA. To shake the broken filaments—listening to them rattle, like the insides of a broken lightbulb—before gently rearranging them.
Perhaps there is a gene that causes my mother, caught after she tosses a cellophane candy wrapper or a plastic ice cream dish on the ground, to justify, “Well, it is clear.”
My mother’s narcissism is the genetic legacy I fear. Studies have tried to answer the question whether narcissism is genetic. The short answer: possibly. Several studies from across the world have demonstrated that narcissism is at least partly genetic—over 50% in some cases.
In all likelihood, I must go even further: to the place where behaviors and environment can affect genetic expression, or epigenetics. What life experiences replicate from there?
Amidst a pogrom in Lithuania: my great-great-grandmother, Zloti Slavodovsky, hides family silver in folds of blankets, so it remains unseen by guards at the ghetto checkpoint. Zloti passes this instinct down to Holocaust survivors in our family, including my mother.
How have conditions changed so that my genes can react differently and still keep me safe? These are the examinations to conduct. The replications to truncate. To pass something better down to my son.
First published in Dreamer’s Magazine – awarded first place in the 2025 Dreamers’ Micro Nonfiction Contest.
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KM Kramer is a writer, previously a First Amendment attorney, who feels most at home in California. A Stanford graduate, she received the Letter Review Prize for Poetry and Dreamers’ Micro Nonfiction Award. Her debut chapbook, Remaking, was longlisted by Frontier Poetry. Her work appears in Only Poems, MAYDAY Magazine, California Quarterly, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere.