Irene
Vilar
US/Puerto Rico
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© Gary Isaacs
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Irene Vilar was born in Arecibo, Puerto
Rico. Her memoir The Ladies' Gallery was a Philadelphia
Inquirer and Detroit Free Press notable book of the year and was short-listed
for the 1999 Mind Book of the Year Award.
Vilar is editor of The Americas book
series at Texas Tech University Press and a member of PEN. In 2010, she was
awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.
For
further information you are welcome to visit the author’s page:
A shred of black
lace. A broken hand mirror. A
spidery strip of false eyelash. These are the
fragments left to Irene Vilar, granddaughter of Lolita Lebron, the revered
political activist for Puerto Rican independence who in 1954 sprayed the U.S.
House of Representatives with gunfire, wounding several congressmen, and later
served twenty-seven years in prison. In The Ladies’ Gallery, Vilar
revisits the legacy of her grandmother and that of her anguished mother, who
leapt to her death from a speeding car when Vilar was eight.
Eleven years after her
mother’s death, Vilar awakens in a psychiatric hospital after her own suicide
attempt at the age of eighteen and begins to face the devastating inheritance
of abandonment and suicide passed down from her grandmother and mother. The
familial pattern of self-destruction flung open the doors to her national
inheritance and the search for identity. Alternating between Vilar’s notes from
the ward and the unraveling of her family’s secrets, this lyrical and powerful
memoir of three generations of Puerto Rican women is urgent, impassioned, and
unforgettable.
The Ladies’ Gallery was a
Philadelphia Inquirer and Detroit Free Press notable book of the year and was
short-listed for the 1999 Mind Book of the Year Award. The memoir was featured
on NPR’s Fresh Air, Univison, CBS, PBS La Plaza, Vogue magazine, New York Times
Magazine, and in the Arts’ front page section of The New York Times.
Stunning. A lyrical and visionary memoir of depression, Puerto Rican
identity, and young womanhood.
Kirkus Review
(starred review)
Vilar is writing about three generations of Puerto
Rican women...enchantresses and destroyers, the main people they destroy tend
to be themselves...But in Vilar's case, talent, coupled with intelligence,
still holds the winning hand.”
Carolyn See,
Washington Post
This memoir introduces us to a writer bound to make an
impact...An autobiography as fantastic as any novel...It is a mark of Vilar's
art that her story seems warm and alive.
Gail Caldwell,
Boston Globe
A beautiful
memoir, humorous and compassionate”
Suzanne Ruta,
Newsday
Profoundly moving and beautifully written
Rosario Ferre,
author of The House on the Lagoon
The Ladies Gallery is destined to become a legendary
work.
Bob Shacochis,
author of Swimming in the Volcano
Irene Vilar's second memoir
Impossible Motherhood is in part a
continuation of her first book. Vilar was just a teenager, a pliant young
college undergraduate in thrall to a fifty-year-old professor, when they
embarked on a relationship that led to marriage and multiple abortions. Vilar
knows that she is destined to be misunderstood, that many will see her
nightmare as a story of abusing a right, of using abortion as a means of birth
control. But it isn't that. Her nightmare is part of an awful secret, and the
real story is shrouded in shame, colonialism, self-mutilation, and a family
legacy that features a heroic grandmother, a suicidal mother, and two
heroin-addicted brothers. Hers is a story that touches on American exploitation
and reproductive repression in Puerto Rico. It is a story that looks back on
her traumatic childhood growing up in the shadow of her mother's death and the
footsteps of her famed grandmother, the political activist Lolita Lebrón, who
was imprisoned for twenty five years for her attack on the US Congress in 1954.
Impossible
Motherhood is a heartrending and ultimately triumphant testimonial of shame and
servility. Abortion has never offered any honest person easy answers. Vilar's
dark journey through self-inflicted wounds, compulsive patterns, and historical
hauntings revisits the difficulties many have with the subject and prompts an
important, much-needed discussion – literary, political, social, and
philosophical. Vilar's is a powerful story of loss and mourning that bravely
delves into selfhood, national identity, family responsibility, and finally
motherhood itself.
Robin Morgan, in her
foreword to Impossible Motherhood:
“Irene Vilar reclaimed her
life when she finally brought to term and birthed the woman she is today, after
so many decades of a tragedy infinitely worse than all her pregnancy
terminations: the aborted self. Those who think the struggle for women's
freedom and power no longer necessary or single-issue simplistic would do well
to read this book. We dare not forget that a woman's right to control her own
body includes not just the right to control her womb but also her voice. Irene
Vilar has courageously let that voice sing. Listen to it.”
Irene Vilar is a writer of of extraordinary passion,
erudition, and intelligence.
Tobias Wolff
Irene Vilar's dramatic and beautifully drawn story forces the reader to
confront the power of sexuality and procreation that often is the only power a
young woman perceives she owns in this world. Impossible Motherhood is
profound, raw, wrenching, and honest to the bone. Yet despite the title, its
message is that no matter how intense the pain one has experienced, healing and
redemption are in fact possible.
Gloria Feldt
I have never read a book like Impossible Motherhood, Irene
Vilar’s disturbing, heart-wrenching, and ultimately triumphant memoir, for the
simple and understandable reason that no one of her gender has ever summoned
the brutally raw, transcendent courage to write such a book—and yes, confess to
such a troubling story.
Bob Shacochis, author of Easy In The Islands
Impossible
Motherhood is another dark perfect gem from Irene Vilar and a
journey into a harrowing underworld but guided by Vilar's gifts and her light
we emerge in the end transformed, enlightened and oh so alive. ”
Junot Diaz, author The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
…an amazing book.
The Daily Beast
Ranging far beyond the politics of abortion, her book is a controversial
and intense tale of generational and national trauma… [Vilar is] a writer of
brutal honesty and profound intelligence.
ForeWord Magazine
Irene Vilar writes not to excuse but to explain herself.
Elle
…an extraordinary memoir…[Vilar's] brutal
honesty is haunting.
The Sunday Independent
Original editions and rights sold:
Novels:
A Message from God in the Atomic Age
translated
by Gregory Rabassa
New York: Pantheon 1996; London: Granta 1997, 324 p.
Also published under the title:
The Ladies’ Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets
New York: Vintage (Random House) 1998, 240 p.
Germany: Rütten & Loening 1997
Impossible Motherhood
New York: Other Press 2009, 360 p.
France: Balland 2010 ● Germany: Hoffmann & Campe 2010
● Italy: Corbaccio 2010 ● Spain:
Lengua de Trapo 2012
Children's
Books:
Sea Journal/Diario de Viaje
New York: Scholastic 1997, 68 p.