A Nest from the Bones of the Dead: Challenging the Mourning and Melancholia Dichotomy in Irene Vilar's the Ladies' Gallery‪.‬

Death haunts The Ladies' Gallery, Irene Vilar's 1996 memoir. It begins with a recounting of three suicidal gestures. The memoirist's grandmother, Lolita Lebron, enters the House of Representatives in 1954, ascends to its ladies' gallery, and, with three other Puerto Rican nationalists, opens fire on the congressmen present. She expects she will die. Instead, she spends twenty-seven years in jail. In 1977, while Lolita Lebron is still in prison, her daughter, Gladys Myrna, the memoirist's mother, commits suicide, dying on the twenty-third anniversary of Lolita's act. And the memoirist herself, hearing her dead mother's voice, attempts suicide eleven years after that. (1) The book is not always grim about the deaths it contemplates: it occasionally verges on comedy Near the beginning of The Ladies' Gallery, we hear of a professor offering Irene, (2) ah eager-to-please college student, a research job going through a "demographic census of colonial Mexico" and counting who died, and why and when. "Counting dead people and deciphering the descriptions of those dead was not precisely what I'd been looking for," Irene comments, "but in the end I decided to accept." She is on the verge of the madness that leads to two suicide attempts. The proximity of this assignment to the narrator's slide into crisis leads to almost comic descriptions of the research: "I went back to my apartment with hundreds of dead people under my arm," Vilar writes; "I grew enthusiastic about my dead people, I would carry them everywhere, keep on reading and counting between classes, while I had lunch, in the bathtub ... I tried imagining them ... as if they were family members" (49).