Mother Archive: A Dominican Family Memoir by Erika Morillo (Paperback)

Nonfiction - Biography & Autobiography - Memoirs - Literary Collection - Hispanic & Latino - Photography 

RELEASE DATE: 10/28/2024 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE)

A family murder kept secret, the mysterious disappearance of her father, the systematic erasing of family photographs, a turbulent relationship with her mother, layers of trauma and abuse. In Mother Archive, Erika Morillo reconciles these demons of her past by searching for and seeking out the roots of her family. Intertwining memories with archival family photographs, news clippings, film stills, and artistic images, Morillo revisits her childhood growing up in the Dominican Republic, a place and time riddled with a history of violence and a tradition of erasure.

         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.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Erika Morillo is a photographer and writer born and raised in the Dominican Republic. She lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.

" 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