professor on mass incarceration and request. >> the fact that most people leave prison do a little bit of analysis to see that we could be closing prisons already and jails already if we just cut by two weeks in three weeks and four weeks, much less years in convincing people are starving. >> march book to be this weekend on c-span2. this. >> mitch mcconnell announced the senate will return for legislative work this monday. they'll vote on executive nomination and later in the week, could work on coronavirus related legislation, addressing lawsuits. house majority leader said after consulting with members and the attending physician, the house will not return for legislative work next week. instead, they will continue to

hold brief sessions every three days. bipartisan negotiations continue on different options for voting remotely in committees and on the house floor. senate coverage on c-span2 and the house on c-span. >> the as is with usco today courtesy of david and noel ray and rosalind rocks. ms. diaz was born in puerto ri rico. her work has been published in "rolling stone", the guardian, rage, and the new york times magazine. included in the best american essayses 2016. she is thed recipient of two prizes and elizabeth george foundation grant and fellowship from mcdowell colony, kenyon review and wisconsin institute for creative writing. she lives in miami beach with her partner p, lawrence. please give a warm welcome.

[applause] >> thank you so much. i'm so happy to beo here, it's wonderful to see all youan book lovers here. thank you for your seven hospitality. i want to thank the savanna book festival and everyone who made this event possible, including sponsors, booksellers, let's give it up for the booksellers in the room. [applause] i love you all. thank you for all you do for champion y writers, supporting ordinary girls because of you, i am here. so thank you. i want to open for just a little piece that opens the book, ordinary girls. it functions kind of like a

prologue, but not really. it's just a short section. girlhood, we were the girls who strolled onto the blacktop on long summer days, dripping past the boys on the court. we were the girls on the merry-go-round, laughing and letting the world spin while holding on for our lives. the girls on the swings, throwing our heads back, the wind in our hair, we were the months, thehe troublemakers the practical jokers. where the party girls, hitting clubs including shorthand hightop jordan, smoking points on the beach, we were the wild girls who loved music and dancing. girls who were black and brown and poor andan queer, girls who loved each other. i have been those girls underground found baths from homeless and on the run, a girl sleeping on lifeguard stand behind restaurants on a bus stop

bench, a hood bug girl going down with boys and girls and their older sisters and even the cops, suspended every year fighting on the first day of school. kicked out t of music class for throwing a chair at the math teacher son. kicked off two different school buses, kicked out of pre-algebra for stealing the teachers great book, a girl who got slammed on to a police guard by two cups in front of the hospital after a brawl with six other girls. i have been other girls, girl standing before a judge, girl on a dock, the morning after hurricane, looking at the bank like it's the end of the world. grow on a rooftop, girl on a ledge, girl plummeting through the air. years later, a woman writing letters to a prisoner on death row. this is the opening of my book and i'll talk little bit about

the inspiration and why i wrote it. this. book this book took about 12 years to write and it's without a doubt, my life's work. ordinary girls is about my girlhood in adolescence in puerto rico and miami beach, about growing up queer, about surviving depression and violence. it's about love and friendship and family, about our parents and how their actions shape us, about losing the people we love, how we are not defined by the worst thing we've ever done and it's about my relationship with my mother. growing up, i was a juvenile offender who spent most of her time on the street. at 11 from i attempted suicide for the first time. a few months after that, iran away from home for the first time. then i started getting arrested. i dropped out of high school, kept running away from cap getting arrested, cap fighting

in the streets, kept trying to die. i was also in the middle of sexual awakening and would later modify may come out as gay. but i couldn't talk about that, to anyone, not in the early 90s, not in my neighborhood, which was marked by homophobia and to transform you and targeted attacks on gay people. certainly not to my mother. i spent much of my childhood and adolescent pretending to be someone else, especially when it seems like the whole world was trying to erase us.ng i spent a lot of time hiding in books, looking for myself stories and after i became a writer, i decided that i would write about people like me. girls and women who were black and brown and poor and queer and on mothers. about women like my mother, a white puerto rican mother who didn't know how to raise or protect her black children, who spend her entire life struggling

with mental illness and addiction. my mother was and is a complicated woman. she was loving and abusive. she held me one minute, then kicked my back and then held me again. she was, and is, flawed and vulnerable and confident and strong and lost. my mother was and is deeply, deeply homophobic. when i first started writing ordinary growth, my mother was a ghost. she rarely showed up in the pages so ing wrote around her, avoiding the truth. the truth was painful, the truth was that my mother broke me and she was the single most difficult subject to write about. so i wrote about otheros mother. my abuela, a black puerto rican woman who carried me my whole life, carried me still.

who taught me tod pray and cook and chain smoke, to keep house, everything i know about forgiveness. i wrotete about miami beach womn who tortured and murdered her 3-year-old son and dumped his body in the neighborhood close to where i grew up and spent most of her life on death row. wrote about my mother's mother, my grandmother, mercy, a white woman who hated the fact that my mother fell in love with and married a black man that she had his children, and her grandchildren were black. she would later die by suicide. i wrote about the mythical woman, the legend who took her children from her back that night, carried them to a nearby river, album underwater until theyhi drown in fen drown herse.

now her ghost hunt bodies of water, looking for her ghost children. i wrote about all these other mothers, every mother, any mother except my own until a friend, who read the manuscript after reading about five chapters where is your mother? how come you never mentioned her? i have to sit down with the book, take a hard, honest look at the pages, examine my life and other reasons i had been avoiding writing about my mother. the truth is, my mother broke me the truth is, i was afraid to look, to admit, to see how much she had broken, how hard it had been to find my way back to myself, how easily i could be broken again. i finally decided to ask the question, and martha not, to ask the question forin myself. to answer it, where is my mother? to write about her, examine relationship in a way that was honest, acknowledged all the ways she was.

the writing from beginning to end took about 12 years, i had to step away from the book several times there were many different versions. to say the writing of them spoke drains me, correct me wasig be n understatement, i gained weight, lost weight, my hair started falling out, i had the worst insomnia i've had in my life. during those 12 years, i lost relationships, friendships and fen my grandmother died like by suicide. i needed time away from the look to take care of myself and make sense of what i was doing, to interrogate different parts of the book, to examine my life as i was living it. writing nonfiction for me has never been cathartic, quite the opposite. writing this book is the hardest thing i've ever done. what kept me going? i wanted to write about people who rarely had a home in the

landscape, i want to write about growing up poor in miami and in one of puerto rico's, one of the ways black puerto rican girls are invisible and i wanted to write about my community without losing sight of what matters most. the people i was writing about were real, they existed. they lived and loved, even if the rest of the world didn't see them. i started writing this book, i thought not just about how to write my story but how my story was and is connected to a larger world and what my place in that world might be. i'm here because i found that place, thanks to a group of friends who saved me. i was struggling as a girl, as a woman and later as a writer, struggling with how to write about sexual violence in a way that was honest and still hurtful, wasn't just about my experience but it spoke to

something larger about growth, about how complicated family lives in fights and flubs and i wanted to write it without pity or glory or anger.es but also, more so than any of my girls, i'm someone who's had access to education, programming and creative writing, fellowships and writing conferences. it's taken a lot oftw hard work but that doesn't erase the fact that i've had access to all of us and that most of the girls in my community haven't. the world isn't kind to black and brown girls.. the world isn't kind to black and brown women, especially when they coming from working class communities or from poverty.

these ordinary girls taught me that it's possible to make ourak own families, make our ownie wa, they helped me believe in love and friendship and hope, but more than anything, after they had girls of their own, it was thee girls who taught me most important lessons i needed to learn tos write this book. they helped me see the girl i've been. they helped me remember that there are girls out there were just like i was, that my story wasn't unique. all girls, no matter the circumstance, oro vulnerable. this is something we share, something that transcends borders and ethnicity and race and class, summer, there's a teenage girl whose mother suffers from mental illness and conviction, just trying to get through the deck. trying to come to terms with her

sexuality. i like to imagine that maybe, seeing herself in this book will a little bit just easier. some of the other things i talk about in the book, things that were very important to w me, my father loved books. he was a poet, stopped writing poetry and one of my earliest memories was of my father, he took me to a funeral of a puerto rican protester and when i saw everybody gathered and celebrating his life, people who read his book, i thought that poets were important they could change the world. i thought, i want that.

i also wanted this book to say something about access and who gets access to this work, to publishing, who gets to be up here and talk about books it was important to me because coming from where i came from, i always felt like i didn't have enough so it was important to talk about that and also about puerto rican history, puerto rico's history of colonialism and its relationship to the united states and i started thinking about how to include our history in a memoir, something that wasn't in a history book and how my stories connected to the story. being puerto rican, i think most of us who come from puerto rico a connection to the island, even after we left it, even if we've never been there, which is the

truth. as i sank puerto rican snow, comes from a poem by -- i forgot his name but it came from a poem and it means i would be puerto rican even ifo i was born on the moon. so i wanted to reach people who would never read about publicans or people who wouldn't pick up a history book or didn't have access to the history. for whatevert reason and make some of the history accessible to the general reader or reader who picks up a memoir about her hood so i tried to talk about the parts of puerto rican history that shapes me as a woman and human being and a writer. a lot of this influence, the kind of writer i became no space thinking of who i was writing

for. in so many ways, i felt like this book, even though i intended it to be as open and honest and vulnerable, i wanted it to be in conversation with a specific group of people from across the world like i was, puerto ricans, puerto ricans, girls who grew up in poverty and for them to understand i wasn't just writing about them but i was writing for them. something i mentioned in this book, i was a kid who loved to read and i didn't have money for books so i went to the library and asked my brains to give me books and i read everything they put my hands in everything they put in my hands workbooks. that were written about white people and for white people. i thought, to be a writer, you need to be white.

this so i wanted them to understand and that wasn't real. that we exist. this is possible. there were other parts of this book the kind of shaped me from i thought about why i was writing, how they would make sense to the story. one of them was the baby lollipops murder that happened in 1990. there was a problem found in our beach atood in miami the time, thinking really know where the topic came from, just that they found his body and he'd been tortured. i saw this story on the news and it took 24 hour news cycle and at the time, i was 11, i was a

kid but because it was on the news and offer newspaper and everybody in my neighborhood was talking about it, we all kind of obsessed about this and i already imagine myself a writer so i took notes and thought about this a lot and for weeks, i thought about this until they discovered they found the baby's mother and the story came on the news that they found his mother and her partner and f they had dumped his body and blood. part of the narrative at the time, part of what was important to the narrative of the time, the news made it sound like this woman and her partner, these two lesbians killed this baby and ran away and they made it sound like being a lesbian was part of the crime. the people talked about this in my neighborhood, including teachers and librarians, they

always talked about this with either implicit or explicit phobia so i kept thinking about this story and thinking about and 20 years later, i wrote an essay of this little girl when this story broke and the essay was published in a magazine called the son and a woman who had been, at the time, working as an activist visited prisoners on death row, credit and e-mails me and she said i know this woman you wrote about. i've been visiting her in prison, she spent on death row since 1992. i wrote back to her so she could put us in touch, if we could start a correspondence. she did and eventually, itu wroe

to her and i told her i had written about her or that i wrote this story about discovering her story on the news. she wrote back, she wrote me letters and her first letter, she was kind of livid, she was upset that i had written about her and she said you didn't know me, you didn't know my son. what gives you the right to even write about me? so i wrote back and i wrote back and told her my story and who i was and why i had written about her and how i wrote about discovering herer news and i fellow followed along with it and i told her i would like to hear her story. not what the newspaper said what was on the news what people said about the truth and i include this in the book because i think it's important, it's important to see the writer implicate

themselves and talk about how they are complicit in certain provinces. when i asked her to tell me her story, she wrote back and said this is not a story, this is my life. she put me in my place. i deserved it. at that moment, i started thinking about why i was writing why i was writing this way. went back to the beginning of the book and started interrogating myself and why i was telling the story and if i had a right w to tell this stor, considering i wasn't really a resident anymore and i hadn't had access to all these things, but i was in graduate school and the people i was writing about didn't have access to any of that.

she really got me to think about seeing other women writing about and thinking about the fact that i'm writing about real people. there's another woman i mentioned the book, whose name i didn't even know, who died by suicide and i also thought about her a lot and include her in the book because i thought about her in the same way. at the timee from someone suffering from major depression and ptsd and anxiety and suicide ideation and taking my life. thinking of this woman, as a story, as a legend, but i also wanted to include in the book how i caught myself thinking this way and to remind the readers that these are just stories, these are real people.

she was a real woman. in 2017, she got a new trial. i was corresponding with her for several years, i wasn't biting her all the time but i would send an occasional letter and she would write back or she would write two or three letters and i would write back. one of the things she asked for after she let me have it because i wrote about her, she didn't want me to write about her, except it became clear that she wanted to control the narrative. she want me to go to her retri retrial, and i did. she was being charged for murder again but this time, the death

penalty was off the table. as i sat in the trial, after having this correspondence with her and feeling like there was enough evidence to prove that someone else was partially responsible, another woman had confessed, i realized that she was lying. she got caught lying on the stand by the prosecutors three separate times and i included a little bit about my i tooth because i really wanted theo readers to think about this idea of her that i had constructed in my head and how that sort of fell apart because i a wasn't really thinking of her as a woman, i had been thinking of story correspondence as a journalist, so there are other moments in the book where i thought were important to call myself out. i talked about writing about one

of the things that i've done over the years was to go back with every summer, spend time twith family, i have most of my family there. drive around, so i drove there one afternoon and if any of you have been to puerto rico, there's this building called the cortical tourism company which used to be a prison, eight used to be a prison puerto ricans were tortured and murdered somehow, the building was purchased and the company, it's a place where you can get trolley maps and there's a gallery and grand piano people take southeast and the building still has jail cells in their

original condition for people stop and take photos and when i went back to visit this buildi building, after having written most of this book, almost all of it, our thinking, i knew the history of this place and i went, intending to see what had been, a person or people were tortured and lost their lives and yet, when i got there, and saw families and tourists, a woman asked me, she asked me to take a photo of her with her two children and i took her phone and i took a picture of them and i asked her to also take a picture of me. in front ofak us jail cell in a moment that, even at the time, i knew what i was doing, it's a moment that now fills me with shame because it was like i was

trying to forget and i was complicit. i thought i needed to include in the book, to talk about, to talk openlyly about how the desire to erase history and violent and whosein complicit. something that also is in the book, a lot of people have said miami is kind of like another character, i don't think it's true but miami is upsetting for part of the book and its atmosphere historical marker and cultural marker, i tried to capture what was, for me, the real miami, miami i saw over and over on tv and movies and music videos, i tried to write about this miami that was kind of invisible and everything i

consumed either on tv, music videos, books, which was this working-class miami beach i was just four blocks away from ocean drive where people lived in poverty and people had, people sometimes didn't have electricity because power got cut off. this is very real when i was growing up in miami where we would have this building that was kind of falling apart, it was crumbling and a block away, we had a building that had been bought and renovated and was beautiful in people with a lot of money lived there who drove mercedes and bmws we all lived in the same neighborhood and it sort of felt like this strange state to live in a place that didn't want you there with

people who didn't really want to see you. to be slowly pushed out. i wanted to kind of have the miami beach of this time very present in the book. i wanted to say something about how a place can be beautiful and ugly, it can be glamorous and brutal at the same time. to say something about the duality of the migrant experience, how people are more than what you see on the surface. most of the people lived in my community were latinos and immigrants and migrants and most of them had education and professions back home and came to miami and drove taxis and had

to go back to school and brought their families and flipped in poverty. i remember my father had friends were taxi drivers haveli been doctors and engineers but had to come and start from scratch because they had to learn the language. we are struggling in other ways, too but i want to but in the book because that was real, that was the reality we lived in. something else the book before i talk about how i became writer's mental illness, my mother suffered from, continues to suffer from mental illness and it was very clear when we were kids that something was wrong my mother went undiagnosed until he moved to miami beach from puerto

rico. years later, it became clear to me that she had been diagnosed for years and also because we were poor, we didn't really have adequate medical care, she didn't have adequate healthcare. it was clear that it would have been different if we had money, she might have been diagnosed if we had resources, her life might have been different. i also talk about my maternal grandmother's mental illness and her suicidal ideation, she eventually died by suicide in 2011 to something that is present in the book but also something present during my whole life growing up because my

grandmother talked about this so often, she front often matures also suffering mental owners and depression took a lot of medication and when i was a kid, i also was suffering from depression, ptsd and anxiety and i was undiagnosed for years but i thought this seemed like an easy way out at the time, i don't know how us to describe it but it seemed much easier than living. i became writer is also something i touched on in the book, when i was 16, i dropped out of high school and i got my ged and i started taking classes in a community college and i listen in the military -- i

enlisted in the military for a brief period, i was in the navy. this washe also in the middle of don't ask, don't tell. so the military became a place that filled me with hope, ironically, given though it was in the middle ofle don't ask, don't tell because it was the first time people expected me to succeed. i felt like i could start fresh in a place where no one knew me and reinvent myself that i could work hard and have a future, it was the first time i thought i could have a future that a real life was possible and then the navy became unbearable because i was bullied for being gay, i was in a relationship with a woman and someone found out and spre spread. the rumors spread independently don't ask don't tell became my nickname.

i left the military and it's not something that i talk about extensively in the book, it's just onene chapter but i do mention it because it became like a bridge, away for me to think of a life worth living after leaving the military, i went back to college and took classes again and i did well, i went to grad school and i decided i would be a writer. i would have to work other jobs, i would be a writer, it was possible even if no one published my book, i would write. and after graduate school, i got this fellowship to the wisconsin institute for creative writing because i applied, iwi applied r fellowships and scholarships and everything, every single opportunity.

i could afford it, i would apply for it. i applied for this fellowship and suddenly, one day i got a phone call and they told me i got so i moved to wisconsin. [laughter] it was cold and there was a lot of cheese but it was great. [laughter] i have dairy allergy. d [laughter] it was also difficult. but then i started teaching and slowly, things started falling into place, there is a lot of hard work teaching years when i just worked odd jobs and kept trying to write this book and would take a break and stepped away from and then went back to it when i could and then

abandoned it and started trying to write a novel because it didn't feel possible to admit all these things to people. then ihe decided to actually go through with it and write this book because i thought it was important that i tell the truth and writing, even if i didn't change a word, it felt like lying. i would like to possibly open the room to some questions and conversation, maybe something lighter. [laughter] before i do that, i also wanted to review short section because this, i think, was at the core of thee book the book is also about girlhood and navigating a certain kind of girlhood in puerto rico and miami beach and

i was talking about these other girls were my lifeline. i'm going to review one paragraph which is at the core of what this really is. we were short shorts and crop tops, baggy jeans and basketball jerseys, big hoop earrings and no matter what, everybody had opinions about how we dressed, calls us tom boys and hood reps or past girls, our shorts were too short, jeans to tight, too baggy, our voices to god. everybody wanted to control what we were, who we did it with. we were not the girls they wanted us to be. we were not allowed to talk like this, you won't like this, we're not supposed to feel a kind of

desire you feel at 13, at 14. what kind of girl that he loved to l say? even as they took what we gave, took what we tried to hold onto, our voices, our bodies. we were trying to live but the world was doing itshe best to kl us. thank you. , thank you, i appreciate it. >> thank you for powering through that. [laughter] in real life, and very funny. i promise. if you would like to ask a question, we ask that everyone mic inr you, there's ao the middle for you to step up to

the microphone if you can. yes. go ahead. >> i have a light or heavy question, your choice. my question would be what other writers are authors have inspired you? >> so many writers and authors have inspired me. remember reading this when i was puerto rican from when i 13 from i think i was 19. i thought this was the first time i read a book in english about puerto ricans who weree like me, just normal people living there everyday lives and i thought we exist and before then, most of the books librarians put my hands were written by white people, for white people, mostly written by white men who weren't around

anymore but also, some who were, i read a lot of stephen king. [laughter] i read toni morrison and i thought oh my god, this is incredible, you can do this? i thought i t would never be abe to do this, i still think that. you should read everything toni morrison has written. everyone should. some writers writing today, what inspired me today, i love the dominicana, i also read a lot of poets. natalie from when my brother was

an aspect, i could go on forever but i want. you had another question? did you or did someone else? >> now i have to call you out. i'm a president of northern wisconsin. [laughter] it's not that cold in madison. >> it was cold for me. [laughter] >> just kidding. tommy about dance. the dancers you and your girls did, wasn't anger, tell us about that. >> dancing and music for a lot of risk, i studied music when i was a kid, but dancing was more about, i think, performance and performing, for me specifically, performing a kind of strength, it was very often in miami, i

started going through puberty, i felt the unwanted attention from men and i developed early and i felt like i was getting all this attention that i wasn't interested in so i started dressing and price quotes, and work baggy jeans and polo shirt and basketball jerseys and i dressed head to talk like a boy and i didn't want to be looked at and i think dancing was very much like that, pretending to be someone else, pretending to be stronger, happy but was also for me and michael's, dancing is like what we did just because we needed something to do. we were like bayside marketplace where you could pay $3 to get on a boat that had dance floor and music kind of got us through a

lot, we needed to dance. especially during that time, we need music and so when i look back at everything we've lived through, it felt like dancing was just performance but it was resistance and survival. thank you. other questions? >> will you please talk a little bit about your editing process? how much of the book was edited and how did you get with an editor and an agent? >> my first, even before was finished, i started submitting parts of the book to agents i found online without really knowing anything about how

publishing works, i was mistaken. don't do that. there's plenty of information out that's free on the internet, find out if you're interested in getting an agent, what books,yo what kind of books you are interested in providing what are the books author on the market that are like yours? or like the books you want to write? with agents who represent the writers youou love or writers wo are writing about something similar? do research on them. there's plenty of information, interviews and articles and profiles and all kinds of, there's a lot of information out there about this but i went and submitted part of thismi book to an agent was very big house and had a lot of very big name authors. she read one chapter and she liked it and offered me representation and found me right away.

i thought i made it, i hit the lottery, i've got this big agent of this big house, is going to be a bestseller and then i didn't hear from her for a very long time. she was at a big agency and had a big client and i was a very little, little, little fish. shouldn't have time for me. i kept writing and went to this writers conference and there was a writers conference, there was an agent or from michelle brown and i signed up for scholars reading sorry read this book she hurt me read and she e-mailed me, she got my e-mail from the conference and e-mailed me and said, would you submit work to us? because i had this very powerful agent, i didn't send her anything. she wrote me a year later to s say, i saw you published this other essay, if you have work, work works i me still didn't send her anything and then by then, i had already

parted ways with my agent and the third year in a row, around the same time, she wrote me again and asked if i would send her something so i i decided, i thought, what have i been waiting for? this agent has read like work, fred other pieces and actually gets my fission and likes my writing so i sent her work and i sent her, i think about 100 pages that would eventually make it in this book and she asked if we could have a a conversation,e had a conversation about an hour from we talked about what else i wanted to do in the future about the possibility of a career, i envision my career and she offered me representation but the book wasn't ready to be sent to editors to publish she gave

me extensive notes and said, go back and write it w again, write the book. so i went back and wrote and a i wrote and i wrote and i think three years later, the book was ready. the whole process of writing the book took about 12 years. when she thought the book was ready and polished enough, she sent to several editors and we got on to say a couple of authors right away in the fourth the book went into action, without a preemptive author and had a conversation with my agent and i really liked what she had to say about a how she wanted to preserve my voice and not turny into some commercial book, she wanted me to tell her what i wanted to do and help me get

there. that's what i wanted. all my other conversations with editors at big houses had been, we can make this the best educated. i was like, i haven't read educated but i'm pretty sure this is not pat. [laughter] every conversation i had with editors was more about what they wanted me to do and kathy was more like, i will work to help you get this to the book you want it to be. we went with kathy and i feel very lucky to have had her as an editor. when i look back at the pages of what this book like before, i can't even believe you kept reading. i can't believe this is a book and i feel the process was very much a collaboration but i feel very lucky to have had her as an editor.

>> has your mother that the book? if so, has it changed your relationship? she hasn't, does the mere existence of the book, has altered her in any way? a reader,er is not a she doesn't read but i've talked with her extensively about the book and she's a lot more -- she knows i'm a writer, she knows what the book is about, she's a lot more interested in will there be a movie? who's going to play her? [laughter] you all are laughing but i am serious. [laughter] my mom, i wrote a book but so, if you fret the book, he would know that i was estranged from my mother about seven years, wet didn't talk, i completely emremoved myself from her life d her family's life for my own mental health.

when my grandmother died, i felt like finally, i could reach out to my mother start a relationship again. that took years, though. my mother is clean now, in a assisted living facility and we are able to have conversation, and she calls me everyday and sometimes three or four times a day just to say i saw this on tv but it's difficult because my mother is an addict and even the she's clean, she's still suffering from mental illness and often, i don'terer know whao expect something for, i go visit her and sinker requires me to do the kind of work that is harmful. like i have to be willing to forgive her every single time i walk in the every time i pick up

the phone. have to be open to forgiveness every single opposition from every single present. otherwise, i will have a relationship with her. won't be able to live with myself. so it's difficult but we do have a relationship. i just got engaged last year and my mom took a really long time to accept first that i am gay, then that i'm engaged to a person who's not a man and then also things having to do with gender. my partnerit is non- binary, trans- mexican and my mother, for her, all of this seems like too much. i love her and almost every time i visit her, i have to say i love you and you love me and you are going to have to love me this way. it has been working.

[laughter] thank you so much. [applause] >> this weekend on book tv, saturday 6:00 p.m. eastern from richard, former director of the consumer financial protection bureau. >> it's about consumers and the problems they face, it's about consumer finance and how it changed, about the new consumer protection in the role of important the work engages in protecting people across america. >> sunday 12:30 p.m. eastern from a former trump administration national security

advisor. >> the united states, free chemical society, how do everything we can to protect ourselves against the efforts of the chinese communist party, free market economic systems democratic governance. >> 6:20 p.m., ruth gilmore, author and university of new york professor on mass incarceration in the u.s. >> the fact that most people we present do a little analysis to see that we could be closing present already and jails already if we just cut by two weeks and three weeks and four weeks much less years the census people are serving. >> what book tv this weekend on c-span2. ♪ >> the president on public affairs, available now in paperback and e-book.

presents biographies of every president, organized by ranking, by notice historians from best to worst. preachers perspectives into the lives of our patients chief executive and leadership style. visit our website, c-span.org/thepresident. learn more about each president and historian beaches. order your copy today. wherever books and e-books are sold. >> good evening and welcome. i'm a daughter of holocaust survivor trustee of the museum of jewish heritage, living more of holocaust. it's my pleasure to introduce a special evening. before we begin tonight, i would like to say a few words about the museum. the museum