Status Updates From The Autobiography of My Mother

In this sort of house lived people whose skins glistened with exhaustion and whose faces were sad even when they had a reason to be happy, people for whom history had been a big, dark room, which made them hate silence.

She bore a boy first, then she had a girl. This had two predictable outcomes: she left me alone and she valued her son more than her daughter. That she did not think very much of the person who was most like her, a daughter, a female, was so normal that it would have been noticed only if it had been otherwise: to people like us, despising anything that was most like ourselves was almost a law of nature.

in my father's house, which was her home, I tried to cloak myself in an atmosphere of apology. I did not in fact feel sorry for anything at all, I had not done anything, either deliberately or by accident, that warranted my begging for forgiveness, but my gait was a weapon—a way of deflecting her attention from me, of persuading her to think of me as someone who was pitiable, an ignorant child.

"Ma Eunice não era má pessoa: tratava-me exatamente do mesmo modo como tratava os filhos - note-se, no entanto, que isto não quer dizer que tratava bem os filhos. Num lugar assim, não só a violência é a única herança verdadeira como, às vezes, a crueldade é a única coisa que se obtém de graça."

Hasta ahora, me ha impresionado. La voz de la autora es tremenda, su capacidad de narrar lo vivido de una forma tan sincera y testimonial hace de esta historia merecedora de ser leída.