Secret Daughter : A Life in Fragments

A novel of dislocation and psychoanalytic self-revelation, of a fragmented life, strewn from Mexico City to the American Midwest, from California to the tip of Long Island.

Exiled from her large extended family in Mexico City, the narrator of Secret Daughter was sent to the United States to live with an uncle’s family when she was six. Her family had hoped to protect the child from her mother’s acute mental illness. Slowly, she adapts to life in a small college town in the Midwest with her loving but weak uncle and his callous wife, but long summer trips back to her extended family in Mexico lead the girl to rightly believe that she is living two separate lives in two separate worlds. Adding to her disorientation is the fact that her adopted parents, when she is twelve, unceremoniously reveal to her that her birth father is, in fact, her presumed father’s best friend.

Years later the narrator begins psychoanalysis to try to understand her perpetual state of displacement and what she has lost. As her analysis and her work on this book progress, she—and the reader—become fully immersed in the pain and confusion of self-revelation. Her seductively lyrical, sharp, and rigorous observations bring the world and mindscape of childhood thrillingly close, while that fractured childhood’s relation to the disruptions of her adulthood becomes achingly clear.