Status Updates From Autobiografia di mia madre

He and I lived in this spell, the spell of history.
I wore the color black, the color of mourners. I dressed him in the colors of the newly born, the innocent, the weak, youth: white, pale blue, pale yellow, and anything that had faded; these were not the colors of any flag.

it was in the small parts of something that its true whole is expressed, it is in the small parts of something that its real beauty lies.

On his face, though, was that mask; it was the same mask he wore when stealing all that was left from an unfortunate someone who had lost so much already. It was the same mask he wore when he guided an event, regardless of its truth, to an end that would benefit him.

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.