A House of My Own: Stories from My Life (Vintage International)

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I'd grown up with her fiction, including the novels The House On Mango Street and Caramelo, but I wasn't sure what to expect of a memoir. While A2’s Essence of Life (Afterhours Mix) takes us further into the darkness with a spiraling timber of percussions lain over distorted vocal arrangements, the “Daytime Mix” of A3 builds on the momentum of its predecessor with a robust uplifting synth lead and sounds of atmospheric ambiance added to the mixture, effectively taking the composition to an entirely new level. Delivering speeches was a nerve-wracking experience for the author of The House on Mango Street, so she prepared them beforehand for three decades. In the introduction, Cisneros explains that the book is a way to understand her life over three decades--from 1984 to 2014 to be exact. Cisneros] opens wide the doors to the house of her life, and we are all privileged to cross the threshold.

Although the book doesn't explicitly touch on her choice to stay single and child-free, I loved the tiny details she chose to share about her home life.It was a wonderful experience and having finished I have so many avenues to go down to discover for myself all this art and these artists that she highlighted so beautifully in A House of My Own: Stories from My Life. Wherever she settles, even when she settles, she is Sandra Cisneros, a wandering spirit and creator of stories. The pages were glossy and felt really nice to flip and turn through on the hardcover copy, and the images looked crisp on the page. We follow her on her quest for enlightenment, for worldliness, artistic substance, and a career to sustain her. With this collection—spanning three decades, and including never-before-published work—Cisneros has come home at last.

When I was a child, I saw her as being very unhappily married — to a nice man, but not her intellectual equal. I thought that it was quite good how she didn’t explain things, but also kept it accessible enough that an ignorant person wouldn’t get too frustrated with the onslaught of new information. There are wonderfully evocative descriptions of the Mexican folklore, insightful reflections on women’s position in the society, especially when she is an immigrant from a working – class background.But I felt always that my mother knew so little about her own mother and her own grandmother, and all of the women in the family just got erased, that I wanted to honor them as much as I could. And, you know, I always admired that my father had this little business card that said "Cisneros Upholstery: Custom Quality Furniture.