Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan\'s critically acclaimed Memoir The Body Papers , a New York Times Editors\' Choice selection, powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse.
In excavating such abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness..
The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of this debut Memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience.
From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue.
Not every family legacy is destructive.
On a fellowship, Talusan and her husband return to the Philippines, where she revisits her family\'s ancestral home and tries to reclaim a lost piece of herself.
Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher.
In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remove her breasts and ovaries.
And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer.
Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse.
The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body.
Family, she\'s told, must be put first.
Talusan learns as a teenager that her family\'s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread--for a time, they were illegal.
At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather\'s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family.
At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face.
Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s.
Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan\'s critically acclaimed Memoir The Body Papers , a New York Times Editors\' Choice selection, powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse
