Grief is the end of loneliness

Liliana's Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza

Dear readers,

I’m going to kick off my June prize worthy non-fiction theme in today’s post but first: a celebration.

My friend Angela’s book was just published! Since I last posted, my copy arrived in the mail so I can finally tell you all about it. 122 Days is a series of daily drawings by artist Angela Rose in conversation with single sentences by writer Mary Kane. They co-created this body of work across genre, distance and time without any intent to publish, but it turned out so stunning and joyful it had to reach a wider audience. I’m so glad to have it. Here’s a peek:

As I savored the pairings that make up 122 Days a few at a time, I was also reading Cristina Rivera Garza’s Pulitzer-prize winning memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice.

The book draws upon the youthful notebooks and letters of Rivera Garza’s sister Liliana, murdered at age 20 by her high school boyfriend while studying Architecture at UAM in Mexico City in 1990. Although the killer was known, he was never brought to justice. This in part because their father did not pay a proper bribe to officials, and certainly because the words and concepts to describe intimate partner violence and gender-based killing— now commonly known as femicide— did not exist in Mexico at the time. Without the language to understand this crime, Liliana, her friends, and her family had no concept of the danger she was in.

When Rivera Garza returns to Mexico in 2019 to request her sister’s police file and finally seek justice, she discovers the records cannot (will not?) be located. Rivera Garza realizes, “If that dossier slips away, there will be no official trace of Liliana’s life on earth.” And so she sets about piecing together an alternative record through interviews with the friends who surrounded the popular student and the boxes of Liliana’s belongings, including her high school and early college notebooks and intimate letters, the family had left untouched for nearly 30 years.

The result bends time and genre. Liliana’s writings reveal a young woman processing new freedoms, someone as careful not to be pinned down by her own words as she is to avoid further entanglements with men who love selfishly, or who mistake control for love. At times hard to follow, they address only obliquely the circumstances that contributed to her death at the hands of the boyfriend she left.

The unedited nature of these notes-to-self forces the reader to experience, through the eyes of the witty and empathetic Liliana, a life in which a crime like this was unimaginable. She’s revived, in a font designed by one of her friends from UAM to mimic her own handwriting. The signs of danger come together now as those who surrounded her then have the benefit of social and personal maturity, combined with the misfortune of knowing the end of her story, leaving no mystery to it. Rivera Garza draws upon transcripts the interviews and references to Rebecca Louise Snyder’s No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us to fill in the gaps in Liliana’s story left by the lack of language and recognition.

It left me remembering times I’d missed the signs of intimate partner terrorism in my own friend’s life. She survived; a matter of timing. As Cristina Rivera Garza writes, the only thing that separates herself or any other woman from Liliana is whether she’s come across a murderer.

And I reflected on a time in 2020, when I contacted a court in Little Rock, Arkansas, to request files related to the 1997 murder of my 26-year-old cousin Laurie White. I was unprepared for the volume of the documents and also how absolutely removed they’d be from her life, her essence. Exhausted, I logged out of the file share after less than an hour. When I returned months later, my access had expired. I’ve felt guilty for not being able to face the facts of her case, what she didn’t live through, ever since. Liliana’s Invincible Summer released some of that for me. The vulnerable, chatty girl whose straight hair and blue Pumas I coveted as a young child. The woman who loved McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches with Canadian bacon and would do her neighbor’s laundry, returning it perfectly folded. She’ll never be found in any judicial file.

Rivera Garza’s approach to documenting her sister’s story is both poetic and uncurated at the same time. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is at once a a celebration of Liliana’s values of love and freedom, a meditation on grief and how it changes the living, and a challenge to address a global public health crisis whose effects extend far beyond Mexico—the U.S. has one of the highest rates of gender-based killing of women among high-income countries.

What makes this book, and Liliana’s life, unforgettable to those who come to know her within it is Rivera Garza’s steadfast expression of acceptance of Liliana exactly as she was, and the author’s own vulnerable reckoning with guilt and shame to change its chemical composition into something that smells like justice.

Although 122 Days is not a book explicitly about grief and I don’t find any violence in it, because I read it alongside Liliana’s Invincible Summer it felt to me at times that the two books were in conversation with each other.

Rose and Kane dedicate 122 Days to Angela’s late husband, mosaic artist Aureleo Rosano, one of the most singular characters I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. Angela remembered Leo’s recent birthday by gifting copies of her book to friends and fans of her husband’s art, explaining: “During his final earth days, when he could no longer piece together mosaics nor write funny Facebook posts, I kept drawing these postcard ink drawings he admired so much. I kept drawing and showing him to distract him, if only momentarily, from the pain her could not conquer. He. Never. Stopped. Looking.”

It reminded me of this observation by Rivera Garza:

“Living in grief is this: never being alone. Invisible but evident in many ways, the presence of the dead accompanies us in the tiny interstices of the days. Over the shoulder, inside the folds of our voice, within the echo of each step. Above the windows, on the edge of the horizon, among the shadows of the trees. They are always there, and here, within and inside us, shrouding us with their warmth, protecting us from the open. This is our waking work: acknowledge their presence, saying yes to that presence. There are always other eyes seeing what I see, and imaging that other angle…

Grief is the end of loneliness.”

Thanks for being here. If there’s someone you’re missing who this post brings to mind, please leave a comment with their name and something special about them.

Love your people,

Abra

Other books I’ve read this month:

Homesick by Jennifer Croft

Like Liliana’s Invincible Summer, this sisterly memoir was first written by the author in Spanish and then written again in English, without the use of another translator. In it, Croft pieces together photos from her life experiences around the globe with memories of growing up homeschooled in Oklahoma alongside her younger sister, who could not attend school because of a brain tumor. Read it if you love short books about sisters, wunderkind, or uncommon educational journeys.

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

I listened to this audiobook while traveling to and from a work conference last week based on a blurb that compared it to The Secret History. I don’t really see it, beyond the boarding school setting-- but it turned out to be an interesting fictional pairing for Liliana’s Invincible Summer. Read this if you enjoy a good thriller but need the dead girlfriend to be more than a means to an end. This literary mystery with questions of intimate partner violence at the center also comments sharply on true crime entertainment, violence against women, and victim blaming, among other themes. Makkai also writes SubMakk— writing tips, as clear as can be.

I’d meant to listen to half on the trip last week and half on a long drive I have to do this week, but I was in its grip and ended up finishing it while doing house chores this weekend.

What is the best audiobook you’ve enjoyed recently? I need a good one!

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

Keeping my May Challenge to read short works going through the summer.  In 69 voicey pages, this book manages to overturn every assumption about what it means to be a victim or a grifter—and put its perfectly manicured finger right on the human tendency to let any bit of power go straight to one’s head. Loved it.

In case you missed it:

June Reading Provocation

May Reading Provocation

BookStack Directory: Part 3