The Beginning of Leaving
by Elsa Valmidiano
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Pub Date Jul 28 2023 | Archive Date Jul 15 2023
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Description
Elsa Valmidiano's The Beginning of Leaving is a hybrid collection of journalistic prose and lyrical essays, weaving a personal examination of how leaving not only reflects a picture of immigration and the diaspora, but how migration through generations compels any individual to honor the Motherland we left behind, and acknowledge whose land we now inhabit and have adopted as our own. In these essays, leaving is not simply a finite act but a process of resistance, reconciliation, and release-from a Motherland, a childhood, War, a body, a mindset, a painful past, or shame. Within this collection is a reflective and immersive travelogue as well as bildungsroman of a woman who is the daughter of Filipino immigrants. As she travels from her ancestral barrios in the Philippines, to the suburbs of LA, to the High Desert of California, and finally to the Australian Outback in Murujuga, themes of heartbreak, family, trauma, and race are intimately interwoven inside discussions surrounding gender expectations, as well as Motherland values versus adopted homeland values.
Advance Praise
In this stunning tour de force, Elsa Valmidiano takes us on a magical, travel-filled journey and mining of the self, spanning decades, continents and generations. It is an excavation filled with reconciliation, grief, epiphanies, and longing, touching on Filipino culture and displacement, reproduction, colonialism, and generational trauma, along with the joys of family.
Her book bears witness to the personal and political implications of digging deep. Valmidiano implores us to “stop to listen to inhale it in.” Her prose and poetry shimmer with intensity and brilliance, like a mythical lullaby, urging us to lean in.
—Juanita E. Mantz, author of Tales of an Inland Empire Girl and Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender, or how I became a punk rock lawyer
“I cannot see the beginning nor the end of where we are heading,” writes Valmidiano. And yet she guides us with a sure hand through a fascinating exploration of family, body, and memory, showing us along the way that the connections we make between the disparate locations and circumstances of our individual lives can bring us closer to the collective, closer to belonging, closer to the idea of home.
—Veronica Montes, author of The Conquered Sits at the Bus Stop, Waiting and Benedicta Takes Wing
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781959118480 |
| PRICE | $26.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 260 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Hannah R, Reviewer
A stunning and heartbreaking collection of personal insights about the author's lived experiences. Elsa Valmidiano opens a doorway to parts of her life and the reader finds themself unable to stop thinking about the book, even days after finishing it. Abortion, abuse, familial bonds (or lack thereof), and oppression are only some of the windows that Elsa Valmidiano thrusts wide open. The Beginning of Leaving encourages the reader to question how each and every one of us found ourselves to be standing exactly where we are today.
