September 7, 2015
Cisneros, a MacArthur Fellow and two-time NEA grant recipient, has felt one constant emotion throughout her life: a hunger for a place that belongs to her, a place where she is free. In her lyrical, warm, and richly detailed account, Cisneros writes of her nomadic family. She, her parents, and her six brothers only find some sense of permanence during regular visits to her paternal grandparents in Mexico City. It isn’t until she’s an adolescent that they get their first real home in Chicago, which inspires her most famous novel, The House on Mango Street. But when given the chance, she flees in the early 1970s from the old-world, marriage-minded patriarchy of her father’s home for university and an M.F.A. Then, with the half-finished Mango manuscript in tow, she leaves the country for the first time, at 28. She lands in Greece and finds her first home of her own, a house where she writes in the garden looking out over the mountains. Many years on, it “holds a dazzling place in my memory.” Like many artists, Cisneros often lives as an itinerant; as a Mexican-American from “Chicano, Illinois,” she toggles between two metaphorical worlds. Settling in San Antonio, she wears tunics, the same style worn by the servants her Mexican relatives employ, and declares, “This cloth is the flag of who I am.” Now in her 60s, Cisneros vividly evokes the many stages of her life and the places she’s been.
August 1, 2015
The making of a Latina writer. Award-winning novelist, poet, and MacArthur Fellow Cisneros (Have You Seen Marie?, 2012, etc.) describes her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), as a series of discrete vignettes that could be read as a whole "to tell one big story...like beads in a necklace." That description is apt, as well, for this warm, gently told memoir assembled from essays, talks, tributes to artists and writers, introductions, and poems, most previously published over the last several decades. "I am the only daughter in a family of six sons. That explains everything," Cisneros once wrote as a contributor's note. But she admits her identity has been shaped, as well, by her proud, stern Mexican father, "intelligent, self-taught" Mexican-American mother, and by her childhood in working-class Chicago. Although she exalts in her identity as a Latina, she realized on a trip to Mexico, when she was 30, that like other "naive American children of immigrants," she was "filled with nostalgia for an imaginary country-one that exists only in images borrowed from art galleries and old Mexican movies." Cisneros chronicles the creation of her first novel, begun in graduate school at the University of Iowa, when she was 22, and completed on the Greek island of Hydra in a whitewashed house with "thick walls, gentle lines, and rounded corners, as if carved from feta cheese." Homes feature in many pieces: the apartments her family moved into, always looking for cheaper rent; the house they finally bought, where the author had a closet-sized bedroom; her house in San Antonio that she painted purple, raising objections from the city's Historic and Design Review Commission. Besides reflecting on her writing, Cisneros discloses a period of severe, suicidal depression when she was 33; a tantalizing family secret; and eulogies for her parents. A charming, tender memoir from an acclaimed Mexican-American author.
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Starred review from September 15, 2015
By gathering together more than 40 essays and musings written for various occasions and undertakings between 1984 and 2014, Cisneros, beloved author of the novels The House on Mango Street (1984) and Caramelo (2002), has created her first work of nonfiction, a patchwork-quilt memoir resplendent with one hundred color photographs. Her reflections on houses she's lived in and the meaning of home form a unifying motif, along with accounts of her early struggle to envision a way forward as a self-described American Mexican and working-class writer. Cisneros chronicles with profound insights and striking detail family abodes in Chicago and Mexico City, sojourns on a Greek island and in Sarajevo, Venice, and Chiapas, Mexico, and the uproar over her purple house in San Antonio. Cisneros pays passionate homage to her parents and such writers and artists as Gwendolyn Brooks, Elena Poniatowska, Eduardo Galeano, and Astor Piazzolla. She also examines with abrading candor and impish wit gender expectations, sexuality, and her long campaign to become a woman comfortable in her skin, the corollary to her love of home as sanctuary: A house for me is the freedom to be. At once righteously irreverent and deeply compassionate, Cisneros writes frankly and tenderly of independence and connection, injustice and transcendence, resilience and creativity, the meaning of home and the writer's calling. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Cisneros will tour the country with this mosaic of autobiographical stories guaranteed to enthrall her many fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)
Starred review from September 1, 2015
Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street and Caramelo, has here written what may well be the best memoir of the year thus far. She seamlessly weaves "memories" from her life from 1984 through 2014 (some written for specific audiences and expanded in this volume). As in her fiction and poetry, Cisneros blends family stories from Chicago and Mexico with lively storytelling, rich details, and good humor. The result is a fierce portrait of an artist and her quest, and the roads taken and not taken to find a home of her own. All readers who are interested in creative writing, memoir, American literature, and Chicana literature will appreciate. VERDICT This memoir deserves to find the broad and wide readership of Cisneros's earlier books. [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/15.]--Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
May 15, 2015
What does the heart-strung, high-strung marriage of MacArthur fellow Cisneros's parents have in common with the works of Marguerite Duras? They are among the subjects the author considers in a collection of pieces written over three decades (including some you've never been able to read) and doubles as a memoir. With a 40,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
September 1, 2015
Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street and Caramelo, has here written what may well be the best memoir of the year thus far. She seamlessly weaves "memories" from her life from 1984 through 2014 (some written for specific audiences and expanded in this volume). As in her fiction and poetry, Cisneros blends family stories from Chicago and Mexico with lively storytelling, rich details, and good humor. The result is a fierce portrait of an artist and her quest, and the roads taken and not taken to find a home of her own. All readers who are interested in creative writing, memoir, American literature, and Chicana literature will appreciate. VERDICT This memoir deserves to find the broad and wide readership of Cisneros's earlier books. [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/15.]--Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.