Secret Daughter

A novel of dislocation and psychoanalytic self-revelation, told in fragments strewn from Mexico City to the American Midwest, from the Aztec Empire to the Iguala 43.

Some of this information about Iguala has made me dizzy; I have never heard most of these facts. I continue, but can’t we just pause here for a moment, they are so despicable, the mayor and his wife, the way she lorded it over the town as if she were some queen, parading herself throughout Iguala, in front of the families of the boys she would later help to have murdered. Can’t we just pause here for a moment of clear indignation, of focused fury directed against these two, before we plunge back into the not knowing, back into the question of vast collusion, back into the overwhelming doubt?

Exiled from her large extended family in Mexico City, the narrator of Notes on Disappearing was sent to the United States to live with an uncle’s family when she was six. The family 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 dislocation 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. Transgenerational trauma, mental illness, her charismatic and dangerous presumed father’s closeted homosexuality masked by machismo, the disappearance of the forty-three students in Iguala, the fall of the Aztec Empire in Tlatelolco at the heart of Mexico City are woven together to create a cacophony of interrelation in this very personal tale of self-discovery.