I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez

As a result, she was a young and sometimes overbearing (but in a cute way?) feminist and overachiever. Her role model was-and continues to be-Lisa Simpson. And, not surprisingly, her clothes perpetually smelled of fried tortillas when she was a child. (Maybe she tried this, maybe she didn't.)Īs a daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants, Erika has always been determined to defy borders of any kind. In fact, her childhood apartment was so close to Chicago that she could hit it with her shoe if she flung it out the window. She has recently been appointed the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at DePaul University and is part of the inaugural core faculty of the Randolph College Low Residency MFA Program.Įrika grew up in the Mexican working class town of Cicero, Illinois, which borders the city's southwest side. She was a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, and a recent recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, published in October 2017 by Knopf Books for Young Readers, is a New York Times Bestseller and a National Book Awards finalist.

A poet, novelist, and essayist, her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in July 2017, and was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Raunchy, insightful, unapologetic, and brutally honest, Crying in the Bathroom is Sanchez at her best-a book that will make you feel that post-confessional high that comes from talking for hours with your best friend.Įrika L. In these essays, Sanchez writes about everything from sex to white feminism to debilitating depression, revealing an interior life rich with ideas, self-awareness, and perception. Twenty-five years later, she's now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she's still got an irrepressible laugh, acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her.

Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the '90s, Erika Sanchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment-a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy, often laughing so hard with her friends that she had to leave her school classroom. From the New York Times bestselling author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, an utterly original memoir-in-essays that is as deeply moving as it is hilariously funny

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez