wrap up. i think maybe connor's coming back. so thank you so much, all of you, for coming. i really appreciated all the thoughtful questions. and it was a pleasure to talk about this book. so -- [ applause ] weekends on c-span2, an intellectual feast. every saturday, "american history tv" documents america's story. and on sundays, "book tv" brings you latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more, including comcast. >> you think this is just a community center? no. it's way more than that. >> comcast is partnering with 1 no community centers to create wi-fi-enabled lifts so students from low-income families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. comcast along with these

television companies supports c-span2 as a public service. next, from the wisconsin book festival, a reflection on experiences growing up in puerto rico and miami. >> born in puerto rico, she, however, i think of as a wisconsin author. i met her two years ago when she attended the wisconsin institute for creative writing as a fellow for a year. that was like right at the time that this book was either being published or being acquired. it was -- it was all happening. and so i've been thinking about this event for two years. it just so happened that we had a break in the middle. but "ordinary girls" is absolutely breathtaking in its openness and its eloquence, in its unflinching look at life and how jakira has lived it. if you are a fan of educated or

heavy or "the liars club" or "heart berries," you know the raw passion that you will find in these pages. i highly, highly, highly encourage you to buy a copy of this book at our book selling partners after the event. it is such a pleasure to be here to hear directly from jakira today. please help me welcome her to the stage. [ applause ] >> hi, thank you all so much for being here. and i especially want to thank you, connor, thank you to the wisconsin book festival and to everyone who made this possible. i'm really happy to be back in madison. i was actually here in 2012 as a fellow, and then back in 2018 as a visiting assistant professor, and now back again. and every time i come back, i'm always welcomed with so much

hospitality and kindness, and so i want to extend my gratitude to all of you for being here. and for everything that you do for books especially. so my memoir, "ordinary girls," took about 12 years to write. i started when i was -- i don't want to say a struggling writer but yeah, i was struggling. i was broke. and i was an undergrad and kind of new to writing but also just really not sure what the story was, what it was i was trying to say. it took about 12 years to finally get there and realize that the story i was writing was not just a memoir, it wasn't just a story about me, it was also about my communities and these girls that i call ordinary girls, the girls from the title who are now women.

and i realized that i had a certain responsibility -- i felt like i had a certain responsibility to tell a story that wasn't just mine, that wasn't just about me, but that was about us and for us, that was the story of navigating a very specific kind of girlhood in the puerto rican housing projects and in miami beach where i was growing up. and so once i figured that part out, how it wasn't just my story, that i was really trying to speak to a larger truth, then it all came together. so i wanted to read to you from very early in the book, one of the early chapters which is called -- i promise i won't read for too long. and then we can have a conversation. i'll take some questions, and we can chat. so this chapter is called "lahotra." and it's i guess what you'd have to know is that it happens in

puerto rico, and the year is 1985. and it's the story of my parents' marriage and lots of secrets start coming up. and at the time i was a child, so i didn't really understand what was happening. "lahotra." the first time she saw my father, my mother knew he was hers. she was in high school. he was in college. she lied about her age. she had always looked older, my mother, and by the time she was 14, grandma mercy was already leaving her to care for two of her sisters. 12-year-old siamata and 1-year-old tanisha where she was at work. my father says he didn't know my mother's real age, that she told him she was 18, that he found out only when mercy caught them

in bed. my mother says he didn't really find out until they were applying for their marriage license a week later, when he finally got a look at her birth date. my father had been a college activist protesting the naval occupation, studying literature, writing poems about american colonialism in puerto rico. my mother, so young, so desperate to leave her abusive mother, so in love with my father, would have done anything to keep him. sometimes when i write this story i think of my mother as the villain, tricking my father, knowing when grandma mercy would come home from work, leaving the bedroom door unlocked, forcing to become a husband, a father, when what he wanted was to read books and write poems and save the world. how maybe i wouldn't be here if

grandma mercy hadn't threatened to have him thrown in jail. sometimes it's my father who is the villain, the billyant college student who pre-ended not to know my mother's real age as he slithered his way into her bed. how he decided to ignore the school uniform folded neatly and left on a chair in the corner of her bedroom. they are different people now, divorced more than 25 years, but no matter how much they've changed, there is always this -- my mother love of my father obsessively, violently, even years after their divorce. my father was a womanizer, withdrawn, absent, and it was after three children, after leaving puerto rico for miami, after 11 years of marriage, after my father left her for the last time that my mother started

hearing voices. that she started snorting coke and smoking crack. but each time i write and rewrite this story, it's not just my mother's intense, all-consuming love for my father that destroys her, it's also her own mother, grandma mercy, and her children. my older brother, my little sister and me -- especially me. by the time my mother was 22, she had three children. she'd already been a mother for a third of her life. it was 1985. these were the days of menudo and "we are the world." the year there was a press conference in a leopard skin loin cloth, while "like a virgin" blared from radios. in one month the space shuttle "challenger" would slow while all of america watched on television. entire classrooms full of kids,

everyone eager to witness the first teacher ever launched into space. in those days, mommy teased her blonde hair like madonna, traced her green eyes with blue eyeliner, applied several coats of black mascara, lom red lipstick, and matching nail polish. she wore skin-tight jeans and always, no matter where she was going, high heels. she dusted her cheeks with talcum powder after a bath, lotioned her arms and legs, perfumed her body, her hair. my mother loved lotions, perfume, make-up, clothes, shoes, but really the truth was my mother loved and enjoyed her body. she walked around her apartment naked. i was more used to seeing her naked body than my own. you should love your body, my mother would say. a woman's body was beautiful.

no matter how big, how small, how old, how pregnant. this, my mother firmly believed. and she would tell me over and over. as we got older, she would teach me and elena, my little sister, about masturbation, giving us detailed instructions about how to achieve orgasm. this, she said, was perfectly normal, nothing to be ashamed of. while my father only listened to salsa on vinyl, my mother was all about madonna. my mother was puerto rican but also american. she liked to remind us, born in new york, and she loved everything american. she belted the lyrics to "holiday" while shaving her legs in the shower, while making us egg salad sandwiches served with poe tate chips for lunch. she talked about moving us to miami beach where grandma mercy and most of our didis lived,

about making sure we learned english on. new year's eve, she made me wear a red and white-striped dress and white patent leather shoes. it was hideous. i looked like a peppermint candy. she styled my hair in fat candy curls and said she wanted me to look like shirley temple. i had no idea who shirley temple was, but i hoped she didn't expect me to be friends with her. i wasn't trying to be friends with girls in dresses and uncomfortable shoes. i knew that these were things meant for girls, that i was supposed to like them, but i had no interest in my mother's curtains or her tubes of red lipstick or her dresses or the dolls grandma mercy and didi sent from miami. i didn't want to be barbie for halloween like my mother suggested. i wanted to be a ninja with throwing stars and a sword. i wanted to kick -- i wanted to beat up 10,000 men like bruce lee. i wanted to climb trees and

catch frogs and play with "star wars" action figures, to fight with lightsabers and build model spaceships. i didn't have a crush on atrayu from "the never-ending story" like my brother said teasing me. i wanted to be atrayu, to ride the dragon. when i watched "conan the destroyer," i wanted to be fierce and powerful grace jones, zula, the woman warrior. i wanted her to be the one who saved the princess, to be the one the princess fell for in the end. years later, when i think of zula during that first kiss, that first throbbing between my legs? it will be with an older girl, the daughter of my parents' friends. we'd steal my mother's cigarettes, take them out back behind our building, and light them up. she would blow her smoke past my face, stick her tongue in my mouth, slide her hand inside high shorts.

how she'd know just what to do without me having to tell her. this was everything. this butch girl so unafraid, getting everything she wanted and how willing i was to give it to her. and i'm going to pause there. thank you so much. [ applause ] and i guess we can take some questions. i'll take some questions, if you want to have a conversation. >> can you go to the microphone over there? >> there's a microphone -- on that wall. thank you. thank you so much.

>> first of all, i want to say thank you so much for sharing your story with us. i read the book a couple years ago when it was published, and i'm thrilled that you're here with us today to discuss it. >> thank you. >> i have some questions about -- i haven't read it in a while, so -- i apologize if you -- if you expounded on these themes and i'm not recalling correctly. you talk a lot about your grandmother in the book about her african heritage and blackness in puerto rican culture. i'd like to hear your thoughts on as a child in puerto rico, how -- whether your blackness or the fact that your mother's whiteness with that blackness set you more apart from your peers or from other children and what your experiences were with that. thank you. >> thank you for that question.

i'm afraid the answer is kind of complicated. i -- so it didn't -- my father and my father's family is black. my mother and her family -- my mother is white, and her family mother is white and their family is white. they're all puerto rican. and the earliest conversations we had about race were full of violence because my white grandmother was very, very racist and openly and violently so. so as a child what i heard was often my mother's mother who was proud of being racist was racism hurled at us, her own grandchildren. and so there was a lot -- there

was a lot that was painful, so those were my earliest conversations that had anything to do with race. and then my black grandmother who was the person who was always there, who basically raised us was the one who was kind of resisting that and countering that and talked to us about race in a way that fast loving and joyful and celebratory and celebrated her blackness and knew -- knew and often talked about how the world would see us as a family, right, that we were a black family and the world would see us and treat us as a black family out in the world. and then i started having moments of recognition when we were out in the world and when i was with my black grandma, sometimes people, strangers thought she was my nanny. and it infuriated me. i wanted people to see that we

were family, that she was my grandmother. and to me she was much more than my grandmother than my abuela. she was the woman who was raising me, who had raised my father and uncle who were black, and i wanted people to see that blackness is beautiful. so i grew up feeling like the world didn't see me as part of my black family because i didn't look like them, but also the world didn't see me as part of my mother's white family because i didn't look like them. and i felt in my own family kind of like an alien because i didn't look like any of them. i looked a little bit like my father and i looked like my sister, but in the context of our family which is a very large, i felt like i didn't fit anywhere. and it was after leaving puerto rico that i realized that i realized from different contexts in the united states how people saw puerto ricans and how blackness in the united states

was kind of erased -- or like people understood blackness in puerto rico, they kind of erased it. and it had a lot to do with colonialism and the violence of american colonialism and how puerto ricans who were black were treated and erased. a lot of it had to do with racism. and a lot of it had to do with what happened, how race was shaped in puerto rico. there's still this kind of myth that exists that is that puerto ricans are a mix of europeans, african and -- and while that may be true and some puerto ricans are, some puerto ricans are just black, and some puerto ricans are just white. and i think that myth exists in a lot of ways kind of like to serve anti-blackness and to

delegitimize black puerto ricans and to kind of erase our blackness. and i didn't have a lot of this language until i got older. and my abuela, my black abuela who was raising us didn't have this language. she just knew how the world was treating us and was trying to prepare us for that. my white grandmother just hated the fact my mother fell in love with a black man that had his children, and my mother didn't really know how to raise black children in the world. she didn't really know how to prepare us for the world. now as a grown woman i feel like -- like certainly as a light skinned woman that i have a certain amount of privilege and that the world treats me in a way different than like my cousins in puerto rico who are are visibly black, and i acknowledge this and i try to use this and talk to people

about this because i'm aware of this. if you ask any light skinned black woman what her experience is in the world, i guarantee you they'll also be aware of how it's very different from people who were dark skinned. even people in my own family are treated differently, and part of it feels like race or the way that we think of blackness in puerto rico and compared to how we think of blackness in the united states, all of it feels kind of like a trap, right? it feels a lot like something that has to be, you know, thought about and worked through, and a lot of work has to be done to undo that. i think some of that is happening right now in puerto rico because of predominantly black puerto rican women activists who are -- who are voicing, you know, voicing some of what happens. and people who are now after

decades of checking white on a census finally acknowledging their blackness. and it's a process that i don't know if it will get better in my lifetime. i mean american colonialism is still alive and well in puerto rico. that's a whole other talk, but thank you for your question. i hope that answered it. >> thank you for your work and your voice and being here. i have two questions i guess about process. one is the music and music through your life so i was curious if you listen to music when you write at all. and the other question was i heard through the grave vine that you're working on a novel, and so i'm curious. do you shift between nonfiction and fiction like over a period of months, or can it be a day to

day thing? and are there any distinct ways your process is different for the different genres? thank you. >> thank you for your questions. the grapevine is me. you heard from me. the first question -- the first question about music, if you read the book you know i studied music as a kid and thought i would have a career in music in some way, and i am still very much obsessed with writing music. even though i don't write music, i try to approach the work in a similar way. i used to, you know, write music as an amateur kid studying music. and so i try to approach the writing in a way that feels similar kind of like a composer thinking of lyrics and thinking of notes and thinking of time signatures and melody and harmony and things like that.

and so the sentence for me feels a lot like a unit of composition. so when i'm thinking about writing sentences i'm thinking about the musicality and the rhythm and pacing the commas a lot more about sounds than action. i'm always thinking about music and always listening to music. i usually have music on in the background as i'm writing, and i try to pick sound tracks that i can kind of ignore and have on in the background as background music while the rhythm is kind of there helping to bring something forth. and then sometimes i need something that's very loud to kind of change how i'm feeling in the moments. so what i'm listening to always changes. my spouse is also a writer, so we write often in the same room with the same music, so sometimes listening to opera,

listening to classical and sometimes i'm listening to old school miami freestyle. so that changes depending on the day. when i was writing "ordinary girls" there's a chapter called girl's monsters that moves very fast and very different from the chapter i was reading from in that it moves through time and space and actions in a way that feels like you're kind of propelled forward, like trying to keep reading and catching up, and it feels very chaotic and fast paced. and that was intentional. in a way i wanted the reader to feel like they were in a place where the music was loud and things were moving fast but also to feel like and to be very

aware of how the music we were listening to during that time period was also filled with violence and misogyny. and while we were teenage girls we didn't have the language to even criticize that or even think about that. we didn't realize even though we were singing these songs, we didn't realize how much of our daily life existed with this background that was violent. and i wanted the reader to kind of see these things emerging, to see this emerging and all the art we were consuming at the time including the music but especially the music. i hope that was helpful. and your second question, yes, i'm working on two novels. one i kind of wrote a first draft of in a kind of frenzy during the pandemic, which is a

super secret project. this is the first time anyone's hearing about it. a young adult novel about a girl who lives in an alternate america. and the other is a novel in progress which will be my second book for adults, literary novel that is called "i am deliberate" and should be out in like two years. the process for me is very, very different in that writing fiction for me feels like playing. and it feels like i can be as creative as i want, no pressure, and i can take my time. and the writing itself, i'm doing a lot of research as i'm writing. so i'm reading -- sometimes reading about music and art, sometimes reading old newspaper articles that have to do with the time period i'm focusing on. sometimes i'm reading about, you

know, travel articles. i do research that's all over the place. but for the most part the process itself, you know, carrying these characters through this time, i'm always thinking about the characters. and i become a kind of -- i think it's a similar process to being a method actor, putting yourself in the mind-set of this other person who is not you. and all of it feels like play. and even when i have to kill off characters, all of that feels fun. when i'm writing nonfiction it's not the same feeling for me. the it feels a lot more -- like i have a lot more responsibility because i'm writing about real people. i have a responsibility to get things right, to get the facts straight. but also to keep my story connected to the larger world

and speak to the larger truth and not let myself off the hook and interrogate the memories and think about how the truth is different depending on who you are. my truth is very different than the people i'm writing about. so i have a responsibility to stay honest and focus on the larger truth and emotional truth in addition to the facts. so that takes a lot longer, and that does not feel like playing. that feels more like work. so i'm happy to be writing fiction again and to kind of feel like i still have a certain responsibility but it's not as huge. the responsibilities of a fiction writer i feel are different. you have more responsibility to yourself and to the art. and to your community as well. but you don't have to deal with

the truth, necessarily. although, you know, that -- you can argue against that, too. thank you for your questions. i'm happy to take more questions or i can read again if you want. >> i have a follow-up question to a little bit of what you were talking about, which is when you write a memoir when the people in your life are still, many of them still alive and how that works, right? you just mentioned how it's your story and everyone has their own story, but i can just imagine that would be a little

complicated. >> thank you for your question. it's very complicated. so part of it feels like a negotiation, right? you want to be honest and you want to tell the truth, but you also don't want to take someone else's story. and you don't want to speak for anyone else. and there are certain things -- there are certain stories that are not yours to tell. there was a lot of -- there was a lot that i took out of this book because the people i was writing about are real people, and it didn't feel right for me to tell those stories. and i had to constantly, consistently ask myself whose story is this and why am i writing it? what is the point? what am i trying to say? and most of the people i wrote about in this book are still in my life. all the girls are wrote about are now women except two of them who didn't make it who are not alive today.

and i -- i don't ask for permission. i don't approach people and say can i have your permission to write about this, but i do change their names and, you know, details about their life so that they're not recognizable, they're not googleable. and i do tell them i'm writing about them. and i do that because i do want to hold myself accountable to the truth. and i do want to be responsible knowing that what i'm writing is not self-indulgent and not just serving my purpose, that i'm also, you know, careful and considerate with everyone else's story. especially because a lot of what i'm writing about took place when we were kids, when we were teenagers and pause a lot of it has to do with sexual violence. so i thought a lot about those stories we were writing and how i wanted to talk about sexual

violence because especially in our communities, you know, girls who are black and brown and who grow up in working class communities are often silenced and are not listened to and are not believed. and i wanted to talk about that and to also go back to the systems that keep that in place, that make it so that we're silenced. and i wanted to talk about that without necessarily outing people or talking about their experience if they weren't ready to talk about it themselves. and one of the ways i tried to do that was to use a first person plural to talk about me and talk about the experiences we share asked to implicate myself and also to interrogate those memories and to think about why i'm sharing them and why it's important to say these things out loud. there were things that were related to family that i felt -- i often felt like i was telling on us, that i was telling our secrets and that my family would

be very upset. and the only person whose permission i asked was my father because he doesn't look very well in this book. and i wanted to make sure it was okay with him that i shared some of this, and my father said, yeah, just tell the truth. and that was his -- he was very, very supportive. that was his response. he just said just tell the truth. and my relationship with my mother is very complicated because as you read from the book she suffers from mental illness and isn't always lucid. and i considered not writing about her, and to me that felt like a violence because i ask myself what would the world look like if we never wrote about people with mental illness? if people with mental illness or disabilities were just completely erased from literature and that felt more violent.

i wanted to talk about, you know, this woman who had been complicated and loving and abusive and all of these things, you know, this complete human being and try to talk about the woman she was and also to consider all the ways i am just like her. and that felt to me like something that was very important to do. when writing nonfiction when you're writing about real people i think the questions you have to ask yourself are not just, you know, am i telling the truth but am i hurting people? what is it i'm trying to say? and in the end have i said what i'm trying to say? can i do that without using someone else's story? thank you for your question.

i can repeat it into the mic. >> you told us your story but then you kind of glossed over how you started making -- >> thank you for that question. so the question was when the book was published in 2019 it was reviewed in "the new york times" and one of the critiques was that a lot of the moments that showed how i got my life together were kind of glossed over and what my response to that critique is. that was very, very deliberate. i have resisted the urge to make this a story of resilience and

survival because i'm still living this life, and i'm still, you know, kind of surviving. every day is still a struggle. and i wanted to resist the idea that this is a story that will make people happy at the end, that will, you know, be a performance of pain and then how i came to, you know, be happy. because that's not what it was. i wanted the chapters themselves to tell the truth. and i wanted the ending rather than, you know, providing those moments of happiness and resilience, i wanted to resist the resilience narrative because i think what the resilience narrative does is it changes the focus of a story or of a work. and we're left a memoir -- we're

left at the end of the book feeling like oh, this is such a great story of survival. this is not a story of survival. i'm a writer who's asking you to think about systems of oppression. i'm a writer asking you to think about the systems that keep people in poverty and the systems that make it so that girls who are, you know, victims of sexual assaults are silenced or not listened to and why this keeps happening again and again and again. i wasn't trying to say this is my shitty life and i survived. i was trying to say these things happened, let's go back to the beginning and think about that. and so the last chapter rather than providing this resilience narrative i wrote an essay called "returning," which is supposed to send the reader back to the beginning to think about all these systems of oppression, to think about colonialism and

think about sexual violence, violence against women, racism, about the ways that people who live in poverty are treated by, you know, educational systems, by -- i really just wanted people to think about why a book like this is even written. i didn't want it to be a novel. if i'd written a novel i think i would end it with a reversal that shows the main character completely changed and finally happy. but i really wanted this to be an -- yes? that's a great question. the question was how do you know the book is done?

and for me then you send it out to editors and they buy it and then you have to write it one or two more times and it's never done. for me the one question i ask myself is after everything is polished. after everything is edited is have i come to say what i wanted to say? have i done the work i setout to do in the beginning?

and sometimes it needs 17 drafts and need a lot of work because i haven't said what i came to say. and sometimes that gives me perspective. sometimes i struggle some more and put it away again but i keep doing that. i take time in between. i write other things. and when i feel like something is done, i just know it. it's a gut feeling. it feels like finally, i feel a sense of satisfaction. and then i send it to my spouse and my agent, and he told me, no, you're actually not done, work on it some more. but it's a process. i think -- like i said this book took about 12 years and some of the chapters i wrote in one

week. and some i wrote over the course of the entire 12 years. when i'm writing nonfiction it's a lot more clear. i hope that answered the question. thank you so much. does anyone want to go up to the mic? go ahead. >> what have you learned from the relationship with your mother between you and your mom? >> thank you so much. what have i learned? because of writing this book i learned a lot of empathy. i learned a lot more about myself because i sat down and wrote this book and had to think about my mother and her life and her decisions, and her agency and lack of agency.

i think that writing this book gave me the humility and the insights and the empathy to forgive, to forgive a lot of people, to forgive myself, to forgive my mother, but also i think it prepared me to be the kind of woman who -- who can forgive someone like my mother again and again. every single time i have an interaction with my mother whether on the phone or in person, every time i visit her i have to be prepared to forgive her before i walk in the door. and i think this book made it possible for me to be that kind of woman. every single time i pick up the phone and call her, i have to be prepared to forgive her before she picks up that phone. otherwise i mean it takes a toll on me. it takes a toll on my emotional and mental health. but otherwise i don't like

myself. and i think writing this book and, you know, interrogating my memories but also my relationship with other people and my mother made it so that i can do that, that i can be a person who forgives. >> part two. >> part two. >> so what do you do to protect yourself? >> yes. >> you have to somehow protect yourself emotionally? >> yes. >> what do you do? >> the question is what do i do to protect myself? i talk to my mother, but sometimes you have to protect yourself emotionally, so what do i do? i think self-care is something that we talk about a lot now on social media and sometimes in our groups, writer groups,

activist groups, friend groups. self-care for me is therapy. i have been in therapy for a while. but also prioritizing my mental health before work, before anything else, before friendships. prioritizing my mental health right now takes precedence. it's the thing i have to do right now. so when i wake up the first thing i do is meditate. i exercise. i prioritize that, and i have a therapy journal where i write things that are not related, not going out into the world, not related to art but just a therapy journal. and i do that and it's kind of examining and thinking about all the things i have to do to be well before i go out into the world and interact with people. that's what i do to take care of myself. but self-care -- like taking

care of myself is also a journey that -- that i feel like i'll never be done with, that will probably span my whole life because i'm someone who sufferers from mental illness, from depression and ptsd. and i think prioritizing my mental health when i'm interacting with my mother is something i have to do. and forgiveness, that forgiveness is part of that, too. thank you for that question. any other questions? anyone feeling brave? >> i have a question. are you ever told by editors or publishers that you can't write or tell you to try to avoid

writing about certain subjects or topics that are not politically correct? >> i'm not sure what you mean by not politically correct. >> like if you like have a draft of something you submit to a publisher or editor, do they ever tell you like change it or avoid it because it's addressing a certain topic or something that's not -- you know what i mean? >> so i think when i'm writing and i send something to my agent, for example, so i submit something to a magazine, it's not -- it's usually not something that i write very quickly and send-off. it's usually something i've thought about for a long time.

and that's usually not the reason why -- you know, i have been told to consider changing something, but it's usually not the reason. there's usually when you're writing something and they -- when i'm writing something and they ask me to change it, it usually has to do with something else. it usually has to do with maybe you should think more about this, maybe you should take more time to work through this argument, things like that. but it hasn't been because it hasn't been politically correct. i think if that was the case, that's something i would push back on.

yes? i don't know that i have a single approach. i think -- i think it depends a lot on the piece, the essay and like the time period and what it is i'm trying to say. but i'm always thinking about a would-be purpose, a larger story. and when i was writing this book specifically i was thinking about all the ways that people like my mother and people like myself when we talk about mental illness or when mental illness was talked about, you know, back in the day, it was something that we were expected to be quiet about. it was something that you didn't talk about. now we can talk about that.

but i think about all the ways that we've been silenced and why it's important to talk about it and especially how much i needed it when i was, you know, 13, 14 years old and feeling suicidal and feeling like the world was ending. and i was -- i was ill. i needed -- i needed, you know, professional help. i needed to be medicated. i needed something because i was desperate to die. and how much i needed some kind of literature, something to reflect my reality. so i think when i'm writing now i think about someone like me who was struggling with mental illness and didn't feel like the world -- like my experiences reflected in the world. and people like me didn't exist in literature. and people like my mother, i didn't find literature where there were people like my mother

or people like me. and so i think about how important it is for, you know, kids who suffer from mental illness to see themselves in stories and books and see themselves represented, their experiences represented as complete -- complete human beings with dreams and who are intelligent and thoughtful and compassionate and to live in a world where those books are available and where you have choices and how you're represented, where the characters in books are not just characters who are neuro typical and characters who are heroes and white sis gendered or heterosexual. i needed a book that talked about depression and talked about depression as it was, not

as a romantic sad girl figure but about something that was deadly, that could have potentially killed me. and i needed a book that where mental illness was looked at in a way that was honest and where people survived and not just mentally ill but were creative and had all these other full lives. thank you. wow. you guys are quiet now. >> can you read one more time? >> any requests?

sorry? you're curious about my father. so my father is a very intelligent, smart artist. he is a man who loves to read, who read this book in english and not in spanish and recommended to all his friends. and when i say he's an artist, he paints and he's a poet. he writes poetry and sometimes will write me a poem and text it to me because that's how he woke up feeling this morning. and who is very complicate. i didn't write much about him in this book in part because when i was growing up we weren't very close and he was often withdrawn, and he wasn't the one who was raising me. my grandmother for the most

part, my abuela was, and also this book felt to me it was about women and girls -- and i wanted the story to focus about women and girls. and i mean those women and girls were the ones who saved me. and so that story felt like the one that needed to be in the book. and if i ever write a book about my father i think it might be a novel. although like i said he was like just tell the truth. i mean, he went out and bought this book for his friends. like i give him copies, but he went out and bought the book for his friends and gave it to everyone and was like my daughter wrote a book and was very proud. and i'm like you realize there's sex in here, and don't read these piejs and you don't look very good in this book, and he

doesn't care. he's just proud. but he was also -- he was also a man who wanted to be a poet and wrote poetry and wanted to live the life of an artist and didn't. and so now in some ways i think he's living that vicariously through me. but now after retiring he's writing poetry and he's painting and he's reading. and he's finally living the life he imagined he could live or that he wanted to live. thank you for that question. my father is also very handsome, very good-looking. i look like him. and everyone i've ever met talks about how good he smells. that's my dad.

so the super secret young adult model is actually out on submission right now. i just sent it out and maybe we'll hear back about it in like two weeks and i'll make an announcement on twitter or social media about it. but i'm also very excited. it's different. it's very different. and like i said it's something i wrote during the pandemic in frenzy. that felt like playing. how much time do we have?

okay, so we have like ten minutes. so i'll read a bit of something else. okay, five minutes. so i'll change the pace. i'll read for like two minutes. let's see, something happier. okay so this is from one of the later chapters called "returning." miami, 2008. it's halloween and my step mom and her daughter are throwing a party. it's my stepsister's house, three bedrooms, a pool, everybody out on the pool deck, evil ferries and werewolves. i count four women in black sexy cat costumes from the party

supply store. a sexy leopard, a sexy pink kitty cat who's clearly wearing something from fredericks of hollywood. china and flaka come with her kids. china with her two girls, 6 and 8. out of all my friends i'm the only one who doesn't have kids. when flaka sees me she takes a step back laughing and laughing. girl, you look crazy as hell. she grabs my hand, checks out my blue ring pop, and pops one of the lolly pops sticking out of the back of my baggy jeans. checking over single detail of my costume. where did you get those she asked? i hand her a lolly pop. china and her two girls are also wearing costumes, furry leopard precipitate airs, tails, furry cuffs on their wrist, whiskers

painted on with black eyeliner. her son is batman running around the pool deck with other kids flipping his batman cape. people i don't even know come around checking me out, trying to figure out my costume. everybody asking what are you supposed to be? my stepbrother quintan spots us from across the way, shouts my name. it's how he always greets me. he comes over, gives me a bear hug and i introduce him to flaka and china. he is michael jackson. he looks me up and down. are you supposed to be a rapper? he doesn't get it. he didn't know me as a teenager but flaka and china get it. they knew me as soon as they saw me. i put in my 17 piercings, fake

gold door knockers, tiny gold hoops. i'm wearing pencilled on dark liner, dark lipstick, lord knows how many coats of mascara. i've participated on a fake black eye, put fake blood on my nose, on my knuckles. i'm me i say, teenage me. thank you. [ applause ] thank you so much for being here and for all your questions. >> thank you for all of you for coming tonight. as i mentioned from the beginning there are books for sale from our partners out in the madison room. >> the wisconsin book festival continues. next author jude stuart talks about the science behind our sense of