CRYING IN THE BATHROOM

A Mexican American writer exults in her differences.

Sánchez always wanted to be a writer. After publishing Lessons on Expulsion, an acclaimed poetry collection, and I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, a young adult novel that became both a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Award finalist, she is now a faculty chair at DePaul University. In her first memoir, Sánchez gives voice to all of her "musings, misfortunes, triumphs, disappointments, delights, and resurrections." The author begins by examining her offbeat sense of humor—e.g., her assertion that greyhound dogs "look racist…like they would call ICE and ruin your cookout”—but much of her life story tends toward the tragic. Sánchez writes candidly about her painful abortion, debilitating depression, suicidal thoughts, and time at a psychiatric hospital. She became an atheist at age 12 "when I realized the Catholic Church hated women," and she eventually found her salvation in poetry, "the closest thing I had to religion.” In a life "defined by letters, words, and books," Sánchez is drawn to melancholia. In Lisbon, while listening to the "beautifully mournful music" of fado, she “felt as if my soul was being purged”—similar to the "duende" she felt watching a flamenco dance, "a deep and satisfying ache.” The author defines saudade as "a pleasure you suffer, an ailment that you enjoy,” and she's after something similar in her memoir. She describes great professional successes in academia and the literary world as well as significant personal satisfactions with a loving husband and daughter, but she also recounts every bump she felt along the way. Nonetheless, she has the ability to tease out humor and meaning in the face of oppression, racism, and “colorism and anti-Blackness in Mexican culture.” To her, an ordinary life promises only "slow, excruciating death,” but in the end, Sánchez finds true gratitude for her gifts: "I always believed that I felt too much, cursed my sensitivity, but where would I be without it?"

A rewarding debut memoir in which a sensitive soul finds salvation in poetry and a life in literature.