and the impression he gave, or gave that last year anyway, apart from being always muy borracho of course, was of a man living in continual terror of his life.
Deception and despair in 1939. The Consul sees how awful and cruel humans are and it’s too much to handle. It doesn’t matter how far he is from Europe. It doesn’t matter that he has a good woman who loves him. “Muy borracho� means “very drunk�. He loses himself in drink.


“[Author's Note:] When I was sixteen, two of my cousins were brutally raped by four strangers and thrown off a bridge in St. Louis, Missouri. My brother was beaten and also forced off the bridge. I wrote about that horrible crime in my first book, my memoir, A Rip in Heaven. Because that crime and the subsequent writing of the book were both formative experience in my life, I became a person who is always, automatically, more interested in stories about victims than perpetrators. I'm interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship, in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma. Characters like Lydia and Soledad. I'm less interested in the violent, macho stories of gangsters and law enforcement. Or in any case, I think the world has enough stories like those. Some fiction set in the world of the cartels and narcotraficantes is compelling and important - I read much of it during my early research. Those novels provide readers with an understanding of the origins of the some of the violence to our south. But the depiction of that violence can feed into some of the worst stereotypes about Mexico. So I saw an opening for a novel that would press a little more intimately into those stories, to imagine people on the flip side of that prevailing narrative. Regular people like me. How would I manage if I lived in a place that began to collapse around me? If my children were in danger, how far would I go to save them? I wanted to write about women, whose stories are often overlooked.”
― American Dirt
― American Dirt

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929
― Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“I saw children and grandchildren and rocking chairs on the back porch of the house overlooking the river and two old people, dying on the same day because the world would never be cruel enough to make either one of us exist without the other.”
― Part of Your World
― Part of Your World

“It was a dark and stormy night. Lightning flashed and thunder rolled across the sky. Rain spattered a mysterious, hooded stranger who peered over the ...more
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