Reading Jamie Figueroa’s memoir “Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico” about her mother, both loving her and leaving her, reminded me of the way Maya Angelou described her mother in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
Angelou wrote: “To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.”
You can hear both the admiration and the arms-length acknowledgment of the chaos in that description.
Figueroa’s mother was taken from Puerto Rico, raised in an orphanage and separated ”from her language, culture and ancestry.”
”My mother,” Jamie writes, ”did not know how to define herself on her own terms. She did not trust her own experience of herself.”
This memoir is a loving and clear-eyed reckoning of what it means to be the daughter of a proud yet wounded mother, what it means to rejoin a heritage that was often denied and what it means to discover how to write about that identity without illusion or nostalgia.
Hmong author Kao Kalia Yang concludes her family trilogy by sharing her mother’s remarkable story in the new memoir, “Where Rivers Part.” Yang joined host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to share what it was like to record the unvarnished truth of her mother’s life and why she couldn’t write this book until now.
Donna Garban of Little City Books in Hoboken, N.J., recommends a memoir that’s perfect for March Madness. It’s called “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension” by Hanif Abdurraqib.
In the introduction of her book, “I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times,” Mónica Guzmán describes arriving at her parents house to watch the 2020 election results. But there’s a twist: Guzmán is liberal. Her parents, she writes, are enthusiastic Trump supporters.
Alexandra Tanner’s debut novel, “Worry,” centers two sisters in their 20s struggling with the love, anxieties and truths that they hold about each other.
