A House of My Own: Stories from My Life (Vintage International)

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I had to have absolute quiet, and it forced me to go to bed after everyone else had gone to bed and to be a bit of a vampire as far as my schedule. In the introduction, Cisneros explains that the book is a way to understand her life over three decades--from 1984 to 2014 to be exact. Everyone knows everyone in this industry, and so reading about her personal connections to the artistic humans who came before us was heartwarming.

More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. The book pays homage to them, the patterns cohesive in the author's intention to assemble a picture of the mansion of the spirit . I thought that was a neat little element that I could genuinely appreciate, since the creative world is highly connected.She lived 20 years of her life in San Antonio, a city I barely knew before I read about it in A House of My Own.

The beloved author gets intimate in her new book--a rich compilation of true stories and photos from [her] life and career. A House of My Own, Cisneros's new collection of biographical essays and reflections, serves as a memoir of her restlessness and her movement toward happiness, [and] reveals an even greater scope to her talent and thoughtfulness . She incorporates some of her poetry as an essay in some of the sections, and that got me really interested in her poems. Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction • From the celebrated bestselling author of The House on Mango Street: "This memoir has the transcendent sweep of a full life.My attention span can’t handle that in nonfiction, somehow it just implodes at every chance it gets when it comes to essays and memoirs being the same, long, drab length. I thought that it was quite good how she didn’t explain things, but also kept it accessible enough that an ignorant person wouldn’t get too frustrated with the onslaught of new information. This blog is dedicated to book reviews, everything related to literature, travel as well as reflections on art and slow living.

One of the impetuses for publishing this book is to put some records straight: “The memories I present here are a way of claiming my real life and differentiating it from my fiction, since there seems to be so much out there assumed or invented about me. I feel fortunate at least to open books and be invited to step in, if that book shelters me and keeps me warm, I know I’ve come home”.

Throughout each story, though written for a diverse smattering of purposes and people, is Cisneros's constant molding of words like clay . The stories of Cisneros' life are courageous in their sensitivity and revealing of the lifelong influence that her migratory childhood (as the sole daughter in a family of six brothers) that is threaded throughout all of her work. Like a manifesto, it reasserts Cisneros's artistic credo--living alone, charting her path, seeing writing as 'a resistance, an act against forgetting, a war against oblivion, against not counting, as women' . The title of Sandra Cisneros’s new book, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, echoes that of the 1984 novel that brought her literary fame, The House on Mango Street.

To have a house means that you have a space in which you can retreat from society and create your own monastery or convent. Cisneros's collection of lectures, essays and family memories explores human yearning for home, a safe place where we can be ourselves. Were the San Antonio missions rascuache because they imitated the elaborate Moorish tiles they could not afford?I just never really read anything by Chicano/a individuals throughout most of my schooling, including college. She first noticed this when she moved from her childhood home in Chicago to graduate school in Iowa: ”So often you have to run away from home and visit other homes first before you can clearly see your own” (loc. I could relate to this and I often think of how, due to my introvertism, I desired lots of time alone. And he would look at that check and say, "Oh, my God, how many years would I have had to work to make that sum?