Vanishing Shoals is a micro-memoir written during a year-long cancer journey, but it is not a cancer memoir because life is not made of a singular event. With alternating timelines, Sita explores formative experiences in an ashram, her parents' battles with addiction and mental illness, and the contrast between spiritual involvement and parental neglect. In the present, it starts with a rare cancer diagnosis and becomes a reconnection to spirituality, radical acceptance, and unconditional familial nurturing. Sita's book asks the question—how do we move beyond a history we'd rather hide? And how do we learn to appreciate experiences of the past as part of being a whole and flawed human?