Not for Everyday Use: A Memoir

✍ Scribed by Nunez, Elizabeth

• Publisher: Akashic Books
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 164 KB
• Category: Fiction
• City: New York, United States.
• ISBN: 1306774179

✦ Synopsis

-- Oprah.com One of -- -- -- -- Oprah.com "Nunez reflects on her mother's legacy as she works through her grief, and demonstrates mastery of her craft."--- -- Not for Everyday Use-- -- La Bloga "I loved -- Me, You, and Books Tracing the four days from the moment she gets the call that every immigrant fears to the burial of her mother, Elizabeth Nunez tells the haunting story of her lifelong struggle to cope with the consequences of the "sterner stuff" of her parents' ambitions for their children and her mother's seemingly unbreakable conviction that displays of affection are not for everyday use. But Nunez sympathizes with her parents, whose happiness is constrained by the oppressive strictures of colonialism, by the Catholic Church's prohibition of artificial birth control which her mother obeys, terrified by the threat of eternal damnation (her mother gets pregnant fourteen times: nine live births and five miscarriages which almost kill her), and by what Malcolm Gladwell refers to as the "privilege of skin color" in his mother?s Caribbean island homeland where "the brown-skinned classes ... came to fetishize their lightness." Still, a fierce love holds this family together, and the passionate, though complex, love Nunez's parents have for each other will remind readers of the passion between the aging lovers in Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez's Love in the Time of Cholera.;Front Cover; Dedication; Acknowledgements; Chapter 1; Chapter 2; Chapter 3; Chapter 4; Chapter 5; Chapter 6; Chapter 7; Chapter 8; Chapter 9; Chapter 10; Chapter 11; Chapter 12; Chapter 13; Chapter 14; Chapter 15; Chapter 16; Chapter 17; Chapter 18; Chapter 19; Chapter 20; Chapter 21; Chapter 22; Chapter 23; Chapter 24; Chapter 25; Chapter 26; Chapter 27; Chapter 28; Postscript.

✦ Subjects

Nunez, Elizabeth -- Biography