Personal Histories

This lovely novella is packaged in a beautiful bilingual edition. It features a young Mexican American woman living in Chicago who goes to Paris to seek the expat writer’s life in the local cafes, and all the glamour that she imagines goes with it. But her experience is not quite what she was anticipating. The story unfolds as she reconnects with two women she had met that year through a discovered letter. It’s an intimate portrait of friendship—both tender and bittersweet—as we’ve come to expect from the beloved writer of The House on Mango Street / La Casa en Mango Street.

Argentinian writer Dimópulos scrutinizes conflicting feelings about motherhood in her atmospheric, dreamy novella focusing on one day of Irina’s life in a Buenos Aires apartment. Time shifts between the past and the present as she recalls her previous lovers and attempts to fathom what it is to be a woman, and how to be a mother. “[T]his kind of structure has a natural link to our present modes of daily communication,” the author said in a Paris Review interview, a concept she explores in all of her fiction. Dimópulos is a great discovery.

Deborah Levy closes her trilogy of Living Autobiography with perhaps the best installment yet, though I highly recommend you read the first two as well (The Cost of Living and Things I Don’t Want to Know). These memoirs are a catalog of her philosophy, of friends and ghosts from her past, of her possessions, of her real estate, of writers who have meant so much to her (Woolf, Sontag, Jean Genet among others) and of her life approaching sixty. She remarks, “The trouble was how to live a creative life in old age.” Levy is a consummate intellectual, both cool and warm in her prose and always compelling. And be sure to catch up with our Story/Teller event for her last novel, The Man Who Saw Everything.