A daughter\'s quest to find, understand, and save her charismatic, troubled, and elusive father, a self-mythologizing Mexican immigrant who travels across continents--and across the borders between imagination and reality; and spirituality and insanity--fleeing real and invented persecutors.
She risks everything in her quest to understand and redeem her.
She begins mirroring her father\'s self-destructive behavior in her own wild experiements with sex and drugs and her flirtations with death in jungles and the middle of the sea.
She interviews cousins and grandparents and discovers a chain of fabulists and mystics, going back to her great great grandmother, a clairvoyant curandera who was paid to summon forth voices and visions from the afterlife.
She takes his wildest claims seriously and investigates them.
Using her skills as a journalist, and her lifelong obsessions with the fuzzy lines between truth and fantasy, Jean searches for explanations for her father\'s behavior other than schizophrenia, the diagnosis her mother whispered to Jean when she was still a child.
As soon as she\'s old enough, Jean follows.
Before long Marco goes on the run from his family and responsibilities--to Asia, to Europe, and eventually back to Mexico--with long crack and whiskey binges, suffering from what he claimed were CIA mind control experiments.
Marco was a self-taught genius at fixing and creating things--including a mythology about himself as a shaman, a dreamcaster, and an animal whisperer, rather than the failed father, husband, and son he feared he was.
Marco Antonio was born in Mexico but as a teenager migrated with his large family north to California, where he met Jean\'s mother, a young Puerto Rican woman just out of med school.
In the tradition of parent-child memoirs, Enrique\'s Journey meets The Glass Castle, here is the haunting story of a daughter\'s quest to understand her father, to save him from his own demons and to save herself from following his self-destructive path.
A daughter\'s quest to find, understand, and save her charismatic, troubled, and elusive father, a self-mythologizing Mexican immigrant who travels across continents--and across the borders between imagination and reality; and spirituality and insanity--fleeing real and invented persecutors
.jpg-62-8024.jpg)
