Mother Archive
A Dominican Family Memoir
by Erika Morillo
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Pub Date Oct 28 2024 | Archive Date Oct 22 2024
University of Iowa Press | University Of Iowa Press
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Description
Spanning three generations across three different countries, this memoir works as a map in which the author traces incidents in her family history to help her understand herself and her own experience as a mother.
Advance Praise
“Mother Archive is the most moving and perceptive memoir I’ve read in years. Erika Morillo’s captivating image-text memoir is an inescapable open door into Morillo’s courageous investigation of a life scarred by the betrayal of those meant to protect us, our mothers. A fascinating psychological collage of prose and images, Morillo’s unflinchingly honest exploration of her life, from a tragic childhood in the Dominican Republic to NYC to Chile and back again, is also a woman’s quest for love and security—in her adopted mother figures, in her art, and in motherhood as she tries, with heart-rending compassion, to become the mother she never had.”—Julia Fierro, author, The Gypsy Moth Summer
“A one-of-a-kind book, beautiful, startling, and heartbreaking . . . Morillo has a novelist’s profound heart and the piercing truth-seeking of a documentarian.”—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, This Is How You Lose Her
"Early in Mother Archive, Erika Morillo holds her ear to the warm breath of her dying abuelo and takes in the devastating recognition of all she’ll never know. The scene reverberates with this extraordinary memoir’s sensuousness and subtle fury, its layering of political history and family life, and its unrelenting awareness of a past that cannot be recovered, of all that’s been washed away. Morillo has created a dizzyingly complex visual and verbal world, where the brutality of history courses in the blood and curls the hair at the nape of the neck. At once a lyric confession, a body of photographic evidence, and an elegy for the irrecoverable past, Mother Archive begins with fire but is traversed by water—source of life and scene of death, symbol of distance and the substance in which images are developed. And at its center is an aching portrait of the mother, in all her uncanny similitude and impossible otherness. Morillo tells a crushing story about the hungers of migration and memory, about the scars of history, and about the undyingness of maternal desire. Readers will want to sit with her memoir's affecting lessons for a long, long time."—Christopher Rovee, author, New Critical Nostalgia
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781609389932 |
| PRICE | $27.50 (USD) |
| PAGES | 245 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Majoreen D, Reviewer
I have been reading more books by Dominican authors and I was very happy to be approved to read Mother Archive.
We get to read Erika's memoir, how she uses her photography to show us the ups and downs with all her relationships. We also get to see how important a relationship with our parents is. We are able to see how she uses fire and water to show us how they can represent our emotions and behaviors.
Thank you to NetGalley and University Of Iowa Press for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
#MotherArchive #NetGalley
Alexandra M, Reviewer
Reading the book you can understand Erika and the title of the book. This memoir not only gets you to know about Erika but also includes some history from her home country. The use of photography to depict some of the chapters is awesome.
I received this book as an e-arc in NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Majo �, Reviewer
Un asesinato secreto en la familia, la misteriosa desaparición de su padre, la eliminación sistemática de las fotos familiares, una turbulenta relación con su madre, capas de trauma y abuso. Estos son algunos de los temas que Erika Morillo aborda en Mother Archive, un trabajo que parece ser una exhaustiva herramienta de sanación, donde reconcilia los demonios de su pasado al indagar en lo más profundo de su familia.
Las descripciones son bellamente trágicas. Observamos a una mujer en constante conflicto con los hallazgos; una mujer que se siente culpable de indagar en el pasado de su madre, pero que a la vez lo reconoce necesario para una reconciliación. Porque de manera paradójica, ella y su madre están unidas por un hilo invisible que necesita ser encontrado para contar su propia historia.
La catastrófica relación filial refleja sus estragos en la adultez y confiesa con zozobra en un punto del texto: “Me siento incapaz de echar raíces; crece dentro de mí una urgencia de escapar cada vez que elijo un lugar para convertirlo en mi hogar”.
Desentrañando tres generaciones a lo largo de tres países distintos, esta memoria es un mapa en donde Erika Morillo rastrea los incidentes en la historia de su familia como una forma de autodescubrimiento y fortalecimiento de su propia experiencia como madre.
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