"Startling and astringently poetic." --The New York Times
An extraordinary account, in the tradition of The House on Mango
Street, Child of the Dark, and Angela's Ashes, of a Colombian woman's
harrowing childhood defined by uprootedness and migration
Emma Reyes was an illegitimate child, raised in a windowless room in
Bogotá with no water or toilet and only ingenuity to keep her and her
sister alive. Abandoned by her mother, she moved with her sister to a
Catholic convent, where she scrubbed floors and mended garments for the
nuns--and lived in fear of the Devil. Illiterate and knowing nothing of
the outside world, she escaped at age nineteen, eventually establishing
a career as an artist, befriending the likes of Frida Kahlo and Diego
Rivera as well as European artists and intellectuals, and being
encouraged in her writing by Gabriel García Márquez.
Comprised of letters written over the course of thirty years, this
astonishing memoir describes in painterly detail the remarkable courage
and limitless imagination of a young girl growing up with nothing.
Discovered only after Reyes's death, it reveals a gifted writer whose
talent remained hidden for far too long.
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