Over the course of nine searingly candid essays fueled by Erika L. Sánchez's fearless, supple humor, Crying in the Bathroom confronts the often brutal realities of living authentically as a nontraditional woman of Mexican heritage in the United States. Describing her memoir as "a series of my musings, misfortunes, triumphs, disappointments, delights, and resurrections," Sánchez takes a backward glance at her improbable, well-traveled life, from her ancestral peasant roots and the restless energy that informs her best work to her debilitating mental illness and the sheer joyful satisfaction of creating a home, family life and career entirely of her own design.
Author of the National Book Award finalist I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Sánchez straddles multiple contradictory identities that form her genuine self. Her parents were immigrant factory workers, whom she calls "old-school Mexicans"; she is a poet, Fulbright scholar and Buddhist who rejected her family's oppressive Catholicism, choosing to live without guilt and shame as constant companions. Writing became her escape from a life of immigrant striving and the restrictions of growing up female in a traditional Mexican community in Chicago where girls were expected to stay close to home. Instead, Sánchez (Lessons on Expulsion) moved out during her senior year of college and never looked back, traveling the world and immersing herself in a kaleidoscope of cultural, sexual and romantic experiences.
In the first essay of her memoir, "The Year My Vagina Broke," Sánchez reveals how her younger self worried she was being punished by pious female ancestors, her sexual awakening and early adult years dampened by chronic vulvar pain. From childhood, Sánchez, now in her late 30s, battled a depression that was forever hovering, bringing her to the brink of ending her life. Despite the uncertain path of mental health treatment, Sánchez forged ahead with her artistic endeavors, rejecting an office job in the title essay that a friend of hers describes as "a sweatshop of the mind," and eventually finding a home in academia.
With animated, often hilarious, vignettes from a multicultural youth spent yearning for the solitude necessary for writing, Crying in the Bathroom finds the author immensely grateful for the good fortune of the present, for a splendid study of her own and the sacrifices her hardworking parents made so their daughter could pursue her literary dreams and lead a life of the mind. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer
Shelf Talker: A Mexican-American poet and YA novelist reflects with humor and gratitude on her family, her formative years and the adventure of creating a successful literary career.