Secret Daughter - (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) by Veronica Gonzalez Peña (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A novel of dislocation and psychoanalytic self-revelation, of a fragmented life, strewn from Mexico City to the American Midwest, from California to the tip of Long Island.

Exiled from her large extended family in Mexico City, the narrator of Secret Daughter was sent to the United States to live with an uncle's family when she was six. Her family had hoped to protect the child from her mother's acute mental illness. Slowly, she adapts to life in a small college town in the Midwest with her loving but weak uncle and his callous wife, but long summer trips back to her extended family in Mexico lead the girl to rightly believe that she is living two separate lives in two separate worlds. Adding to her disorientation is the fact that her adopted parents, when she is twelve, unceremoniously reveal to her that her birth father is, in fact, her presumed father's best friend.

Years later the narrator begins psychoanalysis to try to understand her perpetual state of displacement and what she has lost. As her analysis and her work on this book progress, she--and the reader--become fully immersed in the pain and confusion of self-revelation. Her seductively lyrical, sharp, and rigorous observations bring the world and mindscape of childhood thrillingly close, while that fractured childhood's relation to the disruptions of her adulthood becomes achingly clear.

About the Author

Veronica Gonzalez Peña is a Mexican-born writer and filmmaker. She is the author of twin time: or how death befell me, which won the Aztlán Literary Prize, and The Sad Passions, a finalist for the Chicano-Latino Book Award. She is also the author of So Far from God, a monograph on the Mexican drug war. Her films include Cordelia, Lawrence Weiner: Writing on the Wall, and Pat Steir: Artist, which ARTnewsnamed one of the ten best artist documentaries of 2020.