At the Narrow Waist of the World

It’s not like you write a book and find a publisher and then go to the beach. (laugh track)  No. There’s so much more to do.

I release the book into your hands.

My memoir, At the Narrow Waist of the World, is two months from pub date. August 6 is the magic day. It’s been a long road, this business of book creation. Mine is a slender volume, six years in the making. Diving into old memories. Finding the words. Discovering that a mix of English and Spanish made the most music. I didn’t write the story with a plan in mind other than discovery: What transpired when I was a girl, an anxious mother, a suppression of self, the tenderness of a loving, extended family that nevertheless could not save you entirely. You make your own way.  

I have in my hands something in the shape of a book. It’s a thrill and a burden. How will I introduce my book—on my feet—not hidden behind pencil and paper?

I am grateful for lovely reviews from Ilan Stavans, Ruth Behar, Jane Gerber, and other wonderful writers and academics. You can find them here.

Some Ways You can Help:

* Preorder the book. My publisher, She Writes Press, is finalizing the number for the print run, and it really does help to have early orders.

*  Explore the rest of my website. I am proud of it. 

* Tell friends about the book. Ask your local bookstore or library to order it. 

* Let me know if you know someone in a position to review the book or interview me, author conversations, book clubs. It’s all about connections. 

* If you live near Westchester, it will be wonderful to see your face at the reading and launch in September. I will announce it.

Thank you dear friends and readers.

Soy/Somos: "Good morning America!"

“Good morning, America!” the subject line of the e-mail at the top of my feed said a cheery hello. The sender was my cousin Ruthie, born in Aruba, daughter of my father’s brother, Monte.

On my visit to Aruba in the 50s. Little Ruthie: brown and yellow bangs, bluest eyes, little Dutch girl in a white pinafore speaking the oddly musical Papiamentu to my Spanish ears, a creole language spoken in Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao (a mishmash of Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch). Many years later I meet cousin Ruthie in Amsterdam, now a middle aged woman, tender and private.

“Dearest cousin," Ruthie began. "I enjoy the e-mails from your blog mucho.” She jokingly retitled my recent Soy/Somos post, “I’m Not Yelling! I’m Cuban!” to “We scream! We are all Cuban!” describing in her e-mail how language differences affected her when she moved from the tiny island of Aruba off the coast of Venezuela to Holland, the motherland.

"I felt a  tremendous loneliness in my early years in Holland," she wrote, "spoke a little bit of Dutch with a thick Aruban accent. Later on realizing their stoic character being: 'We don’t need to understand you. You have come to our country, so get on with it.' So rude in my eyes, back then in the 70s.

"My language/Antillano problem--and I speak only for myself and the white friends I know born and raised in Aruba--is that we have three or even four languages to manage. We all have the same weirdness that in conversing with each other we hop from Dutch to Papiamentu, English, or anywhere in between. In 2016 I noticed that Arubans of color found this irritating and would ask me to choose one language. Hah! And they knew all three languages themselves.

“Nowadays my Dutch is pretty much accentless," she wrote, "so my inner world is not noticed much by the Dutch. I cannot express the typical soft, warm breeze, light attitude of the Arubans. Thongs on your feet, short sleeves and slow walking. No complicated issues to work out. You like me or you don’t. It's understood. I miss laughing about nothing. Our humor is aimed at ourselves in Aruba. Here humor is aimed at the other. It's scary, as you need to be Dutch with the will to outsmart the joker. If you ask me how life becomes slightly unbearable to immigrants, it would be this. The missed humor to share.

"It’s a wild world at the moment but still lots of shelter and food on our tables for which I am grateful." Ruthie recounted some of the mother-daughter moments in her life, knowing I'd written about the painful distances between my mother and myself. "We are all in relatively good health with all the quirks and little pains any body shows at this age. Too much richness in foods these days, and we all love the tasty but wrong product. Hey?”

This blog post is for you--dear cousin Ruthie, in the watery city of Amsterdam--you who were touched by my words and the words of people I put on paper, and added your story to theirs. Today the overwhelming majority of people live in a multicultural world. I just learned yesterday that in New York City thirty-seven percent of inhabitants were born outside of the United States. We rub shoulders with others of sharply different backgrounds and oddly musical accents.

Laten wij luisteren. (Dutch)   Laga nos scucha. (Papiamentu)  Escuchemos. (Spanish)  Let's just listen.

Una Cubana Takes Off Her American Suit

Live now on Huffpost: Soy Somos: Una Cubana Takes Off Her American Suit.

It's a deeply felt conversation about returning to the land of your parents and grandparents that you never knew. Carolina, whom you've met before in Soy/Somos: I'm Not Yelling, I'm Cuban is married to a Welshman and has three adult kids. She's a fabulous dancer, loving wife, mother,  daughter, and sister. But during her recent visits to Cuba, she says, "I was me."

I understand. Though I emigrated from Panama almost fifty years ago and have returned many times, the feel of the air, the taste of the local oranges, the bathtub temperature of the mighty Pacific--all of these--pull at me. They are me.  Let's not even get into the dynamic of extended families in Latin America... 

Here are details about Cuba seen from the inside, not visible to ordinary tourists. Take a look. Would love to hear what you think.

Soy Somos: Una Cubana Takes Off Her American Suit.