Crying in the Bathroom
A Memoir
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Equal parts pee-your-pants hilarity and break your heart poignancy- like the perfect brunch date you never want to end!"--America Ferrera, Emmy award-winning actress in Ugly Betty
From the New York Times bestselling author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, an utterly original memoir-in-essays that is as deeply moving as it is disarmingly funny
Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the ‘90s, Erika L. Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment—a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy and dreamed of an unlikely life as a poet. Twenty-five years later, she’s now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she’s still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her.
In these essays about everything from sex to white feminism to debilitating depression to the redemptive pursuits of spirituality, art, and travel, Sánchez reveals an interior life that is rich with ideas, self-awareness, and perception—that of a woman who charted a path entirely of her own making. Raunchy, insightful, unapologetic, and brutally honest, Crying in the Bathroom is Sánchez at her best: a book that will make you feel that post-confessional high that comes from talking for hours with your best friend.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and essayist Sánchez (Lessons on Expulsion) tallies the "triumphs, disappointments, delights, and resurrections" of her life in this raw and sensuous memoir in essays. Since coming into the world as a "suicidal fetus" ("My umbilical cord almost strangled me when I was born"), Sánchez has experienced despair and wonder intensely. These dueling states become the through line to lyrical musings that, though blunt in their candor ("I called a suicide hotline, but no one answered, which I didn't know was a thing"), are leavened by the author's great wit and compassion. The daughter of working-class Mexican immigrants, Sánchez recounts befuddled and enlightening escapades—including succumbing to sexual urges "after battling a yeast infection" during her Fulbright year in Spain (in the aptly titled "The Year My Vagina Broke"), and combating depression with electroconvulsive therapy. In "Down to Clown," she muses on humor as a way to cope with being marginalized—"oppressed people, without question, are always the funniest"—while "Difficult Sun" strikes a heart-wrenching chord in its reckoning with an abortion she had at age 34: "I've been a writer for most of my life, and words fail me here." Even when Sánchez finds happiness and its traditional markers (successful writing career, husband, child, home), her writing shines with a deep humility wrought from the hard-won nature of her personal peace. The result is another satisfying addition to Sánchez's deeply moving body of works.
