Some things are often left unspoken: a child who was never born, a mother only radiating  darkness, or the desires that are not satisfied with motherhood alone, no matter how much you love your family. This narrative begins in the night-time silence of the desert at the border between Mexico and Texas, where the narrator is seeking to give form to the absence of her stillborn brother.

While her children sleep peacefully near the death certificate she found at her grandmother’s house, the narrator retraces her family history and approaches a maternal womb that has become a trap, like the jars into which octopuses can enter but not escape. From this space, the words to tell what is often left unspoken will flow, streams of personal and shared experiences that cross borders and boundaries.

With this narrative-poetic memoir of remarkable elegance and depth, Iliana Pichardo Urrutia shows that writing can be both a scalpel that penetrates pain and a needle that seams distance and solitude. Through her own experience and the concept of border, Pichardo Urrutia intertwines reflections on motherhood and migration, and gives aesthetic form to the process of mourning in a fragmented, intense, and vital text.

 

about 24.000 words – Original Language: Spanish (Hachette México, 2025).