In this moving and funny memoir, award-winning playwright Guillermo Reyes untangles his life as the secretly illegitimate son of a Chilean immigrant to the United States and as a young man struggling with sexual repression, body image, and gay identity. But this is a double-decker memoir that also tells the poignant, bittersweet, and adventurous story of Guillermo's mother, Maria, who supports herself and her son cleaning houses and then working as a nanny in Washington, D.C. and eventually in Hollywood.
In one memorable scene, after realizing that her friend Carmen is cleaning the house...

This is a rarity in contemporary writing, a truly bilingual enterprise, as in Susana Chavez-Silverman's previous memoir, Killer Cronicas. Chavez-Silverman switches between English and Spanish, creating alinguistic mestizaje that is still a surprise encounter in the world of letters today, and the author forms one of a small but growing band of writers to embrace bilingualism as a literary force. Also like Killer Cronicas, each chapter in Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles is a "cronica," a vignette that began as intimate diary entries and e-mails and...