Cisneros considers identity, feminism, family in ‘House of My Own’

Knopf

$28.95, 400 pages

Sandra Cisneros, the award-winning Mexican-American novelist, poet, short story writer and essayist, has been writing about her search for a home of her own since her first novel, “The House on Mango Street.” In the story from which her new memoir takes its title, she describes her dream house:

“Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up after. Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.”

“A House of My Own” tells the story of that quest, in a book as beautifully appointed as Cisneros’ legendary “purple” home in San Antonio, with lustrous pages, color photographs and colorful chapter headings that lend it the look and feel of an objet d’art.

Cisneros’ use of the word home is elastic, denoting far more than “just the place where you were born,” or even necessarily the place you live, explains the author of “Caramelo” and “Woman Hollering Creek.” “It’s the place where you become yourself.” In this collection of 44 essays can be seen the many glorious, sometimes furious ways she added rooms to her house of the spirit.

These “stories from my life” assemble nonfiction drawn from three decades, including lectures, travel pieces, keynote speeches, letters, poems and memories, arranged in loose chronological order. Touching on themes similar to those found in her fiction — identity, belonging, culture, feminism, the importance of home and kinship — each has a new introduction explaining the context and why she chose it.

The book’s atypical form offers a truer portrait of Cisneros than might be found in a conventional autobiography. A literary salon steeped in storytelling and writers, it honors her process and influences and draws attention to crucial and difficult points of her development. Like a manifesto, it reasserts Cisneros’ artistic credo — living alone, charting her path, seeing writing as “a resistance, an act against forgetting, a war against oblivion, against not counting, as women.”

As the daughter of a Mexican father and a Mexican-American mother, Cisneros has struggled to unite the contradictory sides of her cultural background. From the opening essay that evokes the summer cottage on a Greek island where she finished writing her first book, she summons the wide range of experiences and encounters that enabled her to forge a connection between her “Mexican and ’Merican” selves.

In ofrendas (eulogies) for her late parents, Cisneros describes growing up in a working-class, Chicago family — she was the only girl out of six boys — who scorned customs like the Day of the Dead, moved frequently and paid annual visits to her paternal grandparents in Mexico City. Interwoven into a piece about the priceless furniture, art and sculpture in a museum are fond remembrances of the author's upholsterer father and artistic mother, and the hometown love of glamor that inspired her appreciation for folk and Latino art.

Breaking from tradition and family was the first step in a bittersweet odyssey to graduate school in Iowa City, where her otherness fueled “a quiet revolution,” and she developed the voice of her fiction: “an anti-academic voice — a child’s voice, a girl’s voice, a poor girl’s voice, a spoken voice, the voice of an American Mexican.”

Books, too, became teachers and healers: “I believe books are medicine,” she writes. “A library is a medicine cabinet.” Cisneros looks back on many of her earliest role models — Gwendolyn Brooks, Juan Rulfo, Pablo Neruda, Elena Poniatowska, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Wolfe — in whose works she saw her own reflection:

“And so, I find myself coming home when I read Thomas Wolfe. The Gants are my family, their crowded rooms shared intimately with strangers called family. They take me in and happen to lead me to my own crowded rooms in a house on Mango Street…”

Cisneros pays tribute to every friend, artist, musician and tradition that inspired her to reconnect with her rootas, to redefine herself. Musicians like Astor Piazzola and Chavela Vargas, who taught Cisneros to accept and celebrate her Latina identity, to channel her passion. She conjures las mujeres bravas — her women ancestors — whose courage helps her "listen to my own heart, that incredible witch's broom that will take me where I need to go."

And though she left her longtime San Antonio ties behind when she moved to Mexico, Cisneros applauds the community trailblazers who helped point her generation “toward art, bringing down the apartheid walls of class, color, and sexuality” that had marked the city for generations.

Toward the end of her memoir, Cisneros recalls a novel, “The Ten Thousand Things,” a treasury of diverse “myths and stories” that “paid tribute to what was holy” to its author, Maria Dermout. Reading it, she said, “was to be reminded of one’s own ten thousand things,” adding, “I especially liked how the narrator talked to you as if she were in the room.”

This is the essence of "A House of My Own," a book that reminds us of the importance of our place in the world, and of the holiness of what we find there. Cisneros is right there in the room, fiercely candid, warm and gracious, talking about everything: the best recipe for mole, her humiliating fifth-grade report card, the men in her life, her dreams about old houses and forgotten pets — and writing, always writing.