Liliana's Invincible Summer
A Sister's Search for Justice
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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIR
A 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
A NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, TIME AND NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Meticulously written and deeply moving . . . A triumph' JACKIE KAY
'Absorbing and poetic' ECONOMIST
'Full of tenderness and beauty' MARIANA ENRIQUEZ
From one of Mexico's greatest contemporary writers, an astonishing work of non-fiction that illuminates an epidemic of femicide in Mexico through the death of one woman.
I seek justice, I finally said. I seek justice for my sister . . . Sometimes it takes twenty-nine years to say it out loud, to say it out loud on a phone call with a lawyer at the General Attorney's office: I seek justice.
On the dawn of 16 July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, Cristina Rivera Garza's sister, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of femicide.
She was a twenty-year-old architecture student who had been trying for years to end her relationship with a high school boyfriend who insisted on not letting her go. A few weeks before the tragedy, Liliana made a definitive decision: at the height of her winter she had discovered that, as Albert Camus had said, there was an invincible summer in her. She would leave him behind. She would start a new life. She would do a master's degree and a doctorate; she would travel to London. But his decision was that she would not have a life without him.
Returning to Mexico after decades of living in the United States, Cristina Rivera Garza collects and curates evidence – handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, voice recordings and architectural blueprints – to defy a pattern of increasingly normalised, gendered violence and understand the life lost. What she finds is Liliana: her sister's voice crossing time and, like that of so many disappeared and outraged women in Mexico, demanding justice.
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In this gut-wrenching blend of memoir and reportage, Rivera Garza (No One Will See Me Cry), a Hispanic studies professor at the University of Houston, investigates her younger sister Liliana's 1990 murder by an abusive ex-boyfriend, who remains at large. Placing her sister's death in the context of the femicide crisis in Mexico, Rivera Garza interweaves startling facts and statistics (an average of 10 women are killed per day in Mexico) with lyrical meditations on her family life and Liliania's efforts to break away from her obsessive high school boyfriend, Ángel González Ramos. Liliana's oft-repeated desire not to be left alone haunts the narrative, as do Rivera Garza's guilt and shame over her sister's death. Documenting the meticulous detective work of recreating the years and months leading up to Liliana's murder, Rivera Garcia interweaves case files and newspaper accounts with excerpts from Liliana's teenage diary, where the early warning signs about Ángel appear. Thoughout, Rivera Garza laments how she and Liliana's friends lacked "the insight, the language, that would allow us to identify the signs of danger," and explores "how patriarchy deforms and hurts men, as much as it does women." This piercing remembrance hits home.
