 I don't think I could do it in Spanish. As a matter of fact, I had to hire someone to translate looking for Esperanza into Spanish. I couldn't do it myself. In all centers, because the plot there was Esperanza, that would definitely be really interesting for the Spanish public. Yeah. Let's say that I hired someone to translate it and that she did a very poor job. So it was money that was wasted. To give you an example, there are some things that she did a little transliteration, which is not a good idea, right? So I'd say this was the straw that broke the camel's back. You cannot say that in Spanish. It doesn't make sense. And she translated that into Spanish. We don't have that in Spanish. We have another one, a totally different one. So it just didn't make sense. I have a question. These people who have just come from Mexico, but your book is written in English, but you were interviewing them in Spanish. Yes. OK. I just wanted to make sure. Yeah, in Spanish. OK. Yeah. It was fun. Thank you. Can you eat tomatoes or strawberries? After all that? Of course. With a brand new appreciation for everything that is put in front of them. Oh, yeah. If we're good, I would like to read a little bit from my mother's funeral. When I was 13, I had a curfew. And one day I forgot my curfew because I was busy with Diego behind the stadium. And I got home very late. And rather than admitting that I had lost track of time, I just told my mom the most ridiculous lie. I told my mom that I had been kidnapped. And it was one of those lies that you know it only gets worse through the time. So it was like, who kidnapped you? Like three guys in a car? Three guys in a car? Where did they take you? And because I couldn't make anything up, I told her that I had been drugged. So the next day, she took me to the doctor to make sure that I had not been violated. And I had the doctor examine me in front of my mom. She wanted to make sure that I was still a virgin. So I would like to read a little bit about that. So I was still a virgin. That's the result. And after that, we go straight to the nearest church. We're alone kneeling on a wooden pew, hands clasped, below on her chains, heads bowed before a colossal cross with a dark jizzle's affixed to it. He's missing a toe. Probably he lost it during an Easter procession. Mom doesn't notice this or the donation box sitting at his feet with a handwritten note that reads, let's give our savior his toe back. Mom whispers prayers. She says that we need to thank God, her God, that those kidnappers didn't violate me. All I can think about is the missing toe and how disgusted I am on myself for making my mom sick with worry last night, for lying to my sisters, for letting Diego touch my lemons because they were called lemons. I got what I deserved, me little liar, me, me, little whore, me, me, puta. My mom is on her knees. Gracias, gracias Dios mío, that my girl's still a virgin. Gracias Jesus for keeping her intact. Mom can't stop hugging me. She can't get enough of me, of this reassured me, of this shiny me and touch me that pleases her so. I knew it. I knew it, she says to herself and to me, and it given the chance to every passerby. I'm still a virgin and that's all that matters. Virgin, intact and adulterated. Mom says big words all mean the same thing and her words fit me perfectly. My private self has been identified. I have been branded virgin, God's goods constantly monitored, future husband, do no fear, virgin, under close inspection. I visualize this membrane inside me, this membrane that makes me what I am. I picture it as pink, thin and translucent, like a bubble of strawberry gum, like a film of cotton candy, like a delicate Miranda Glass bowl. Does it resonate, like a drum if you tap it with your fingernails? Did the woman doctor strum it with her two gold fingers? And if she did, was it prickly like the skin of a peach, bumpy like the underside of my tongue, sleek and bouncy like a trampoline in the rain? I feel as if I have morphed from being an invisible little girl into a woman with an identity, someone whose best quality can finally be described. Virgin, this transformation, this new definition of myself proposes me into an outer world. So this is what being a woman is all about. This is it, I think, no more hiccups of self-awareness. This time, the inclined toward full womanhood is steady. I will never sleep back, will never be free of this new me. I have a hidden trophy inside my crotch, something so valuable that in 13 years, it has been struck only by two latex fingers and sin in all its impish splendor, only by mom. I have been brooding all day. By the time the sun sets behind the cordillera, I have a pixie hair cut with a training bra made of cotton because mom says that silky underwear encourages precocious sexuality. And my silky legs glisten with a hairless glow. Alone in the bathroom, I shaved my legs, cruelly the private mom of a special location in our lives that she wanted to be a part of. I took that away from her maliciously, gladly, with swift rays of runs up and down my legs, a simple act full of spite and impulse born in the blur of the humiliation on the exam table, my private act of resistance, an urgent moment, uncontrollable and explosive like a spasm. Now we're even. Tonight, as I lean against the door jamming the bedroom, mom and I share, I think of packing my clothes and running away. But I know I can get no farther than the closet with my clothes hung. I know I suffer from a hunger that for now only my family can quench. I know that if I had to choose between freedom and family, I'll choose the tyranny of mom's love and her futile women's consoles that have taught me nothing about democracy and everything about tenacity. We used, because we were five girls, so we used to have women's consoles, that's what mom called them, where we got together to decide everything in theory. But she had already made all the decisions. We just got together to listen to my mom's decisions. So I look at mom from the hallway. She's sitting in the dark, staring at our black and white TV set. I wonder if she's looking at her own reflection on the screen. Does she see the woman I see? Late 40s, dark half moons under her sad eyes, short gray hair, a permanent frown, dark and smiling lips, a haggard woman with nothing to show for a lifetime of diapers, late night colleagues, schools and paid bills, hunger, lies, loneliness. I walk to the couch and sit beside her. She puts her arm around me. For a while, I sit rigidly, but then I close my eyes, ease against her, rest my head on her shoulder, and I feel like crying for her. I wish a new story, a secret recipe that I could give to her. I wish I could cradle her in my arms and tell her my secret, tell her that she will wake up tomorrow, stronger, better, without the uncertainty of loneliness, but somehow feeling that her life is something solid that she is carving. I wish this unnamed thing, which I do not possess, but long to share with her, will feel her with renewed fortitude and get her ready to face the day, to steer the reins of its hours and clothe its quotidian drabness and disembowel it until the day gives my mom the joy she deserves. But I have nothing to tell her, nothing to give her but the reaffirmation of my chastity. I sob quietly, why are you crying? She whispers, I'm crying for you, mama. Well, that's silly, she says. Then she rises and says good night. How are you doing for time? Great ball. One of the things that I took the freedom of doing with the ball is imagining lots of things about my mom. I imagined her wedding night. I imagined her honeymoon. And one of the things that I had to do, because I just had to do was imagine the moments before she died. For me, it was important to imagine whether or not she had experienced pain, what had gone through her mind. And it was my way to cope with the loss, which was a huge loss. I picture her last night. I think she went to bed early. She was tired. And the real world had lost its luster a long time ago. I had to tell you this. This book became what it became, because this man here turned a mess into something so beautiful. I have forgotten to say he edited my book. Such a beautiful job. It was just such a beautiful thing. Because I remember reading the manuscript and what Barn did was say, he needs more here. He needs less here. That's what we were doing this morning, right? And he just filled gaps. He was like, give me more. You know it, because this happened to you. But I don't know it. Give me more. And it just gave the whole manuscript just a beautiful change. Thank you so much. From her apartment in Diapason's, she could hear the life outside percolate into her room, the cacophony of Medellin, children playing, cars crunching gravel, sirens blaring in the distance. So much noise. People and their whims were also beginning to bother her. She often said, the more I get to know people, the more I love my dog. She never had a dog. I think she pulled the covers over her head and breathed in the lavender fragrance of the sheets. As for herself, she no longer smelled of anything. She recalled the various aromas her body had given off over the years. Guava jelly when she was a little girl. Blood when she became a woman. The patchouli scent one of her children had given her for Mother's Day, the papery of her menopause. After that, nothing. Her body had become a dry riverbed. Riverbed, devoid of milk, blood or sweat. Her body had become uninhabitable and condemned house about to implode on its foundations. She began her nightly prayers does enough as she always did. And when she woke up a few minutes later, she tried to finish that, but she could not remember which one she had been saying was another, our father or a glory bee. One of these days, she used to say, I'm going to unscrew my head and give it a good wash inside. She was finding it more and more difficult to keep tabs on life, on life. The days of the week have become indistinguishable. Church and Sundays, or is it Tuesdays? Grocery shopping on Wednesdays, or is it Saturdays? Her life was complicated by misplaced objects. Her brushes, reading glasses, house keys, all seem to have terrible minds of their own. She meant to water her plants every other day, but that night she wasn't sure if he was keeping that schedule. She fell asleep, wishing for a better tomorrow. She hoped she would emerge from this chrysalis of gloom. She would wake up lighter, less clumsy, more nimble, less lost, more assertive, less tight-chested, freer. A noise woke her up. A black witch moth made its way into mom's room. It fluttered its wings against the walls. It hovered over the bed, the black eyes on its four wings, watching mom, watching and waiting. Mom gasped for air, making snorts that she didn't recognize as her own. Something had locked beneath the sternum obstructing her breathing. A surge of panic settled in her eyes. God, I can't breathe. She sighed between gasps, swaths of color flashed in glittery snapshots of rain under her eyelids. She massaged her throat with one hand, then the other, then both. She pressed at her breastbone, my God. And whatever was lodged in her chest began to expand and sharpen, cliping at her wind pipe like a millipede. Sangre Gorio Bendito, Virgen del Carmen, Animas del Purgatorio, don't abandon me. She repeated in her head like a mantra, invoking every one of her divine saviors. Her muscles hardened like cardboard left out to dry in the sun. And in a convulsed burst of speech, she called the living nurse, don't let me die. We're the only words she managed to whisper. She threw a couple of slow motion punches at the nurse as though she was drowning in quicksand, then clutched the nurse's skirt. For a few seconds, the nurse wrestled with mom's grip. Do not let me die. She pleaded once more. Her whisper was almost inaudible. My mother's mouth made a silent, oh, in moribund exhalations of moist air. Her head lunged up with an involuntary jerk. Her body contorted with pain. She felt the nurse's hands on her chest, pressing on the sternum with little push-ups that burned my mother's skin. She heard the nurse fumble with the telephone. Words filled the room. Mom, die and come soon. You're not alone, the nurse said. I'm right here with you. She put her arms around my mother. Mom began to snore a ragged, gurgling pattern of breathing, typical of those who were about to die. Then her chest jolted as if she had been hit by lightning. A few seconds later came a weaker strike followed by something similar to a quiet belch. Her jaw shifted south, then east, changing the geography of her face in quick succession. In her face was tension, then pain, then agony, then resignation. That was what the nurse saw from the outside. But inside mom, she felt something similar to drunkenness. Her head swelled and the crown relaxed and quivered, then melted into a blue sky. She was floating. Her thoughts were like fireworks exploding into each other. And in a flash of sparks, she found herself in the place she loved the most. Mariquita, her homeland. Here, in this place that smelled of avocado and earth after rain, she was no longer my mother. She was a woman. Finally, she was just Carmen. And I want to finish, it's just one and a half page. And I wrote this after the whole book had been written. This was pretty much an afterthought that it was necessary. Among Tibetan Buddhists, there is a burial custom known as Jator, in which mourners give aunts two birds of prey and offer the body of the deceased to the four great elements, earth, water, fire, and air. The vultures are seen as sky dancers, angels that take the soul into heaven, allowing the birds to eat the flesh of the dead guarantees a safe passage to the great windy place where souls are reincarnated. Jator is an act of love, a last gesture of compassion and generosity. A dead body is an empty vessel. Therefore, preventing other creatures from feasting on it is considered the ultimate display of selfishness. Bad karma. When a person dies, the body is cleaned, wrapped chin to knees in a seamless white cloth and left untouched for three days. During this time, the soul starts its slow migration out of our realm. On the third day, a dawn, body breakers called rogyapas laid the body on a flat rock atop a hill and wrapped it and dismembered. The flesh is offered first to the vultures. And after most of the flesh is gone, the rogyapas armed with mallets break the bones. They grind them with yuck, butter, flour and tea and offered the pulp to the weighting smaller birds, crows and hawks. Everything is consumed, everything is offered, everything is taken. I first learned about Jator when I was studying to become an anthropologist and I immediately loved the idea. I imagined my own Jator. My body spread wide like a banquet, birds of all sizes landing on my chest, feeding off my thighs, my face, feathery creatures taken off from my navel and landing on the runway of my belly and later back, and later coming back for more. My remains would be delicious, transcendent, ripped into submission and garnished with the savory chemicals that body secretes after rigor mortis. For years, images of my own Jator passed before my eyes and snapshops of morsels of me being whisked up into a vast Sargasso of nothingness. Sharp beaks dredging residual chunks of me from the Mariana depths of my dry arteries. How beautiful. This is how I want to go. This is how everyone should go. I thought everyone should have a Jator. Yet, my thick session with sky burials disappeared when mom died. I came out of her body and it was only after her death that I secretly claimed proprietorship of her flesh and her bones. I did not want her to be cremated or buried or embalmed. I didn't want her to be seen or touched. I didn't want anyone to utter her name. I didn't want her to be dead. There is beauty in imagined Jators. In the funeral pyres I saw along the Ganges, in the fado songs of funerals in Portugal, in the recitation of the Cavish, in faraway death rituals where the dead are strangers. But this was my mother's death, followed by a real wake, a real funeral, a real cremation. My sisters and I authorized the reduction of her body to a heap of ashes. None of it was imagined and none of it was beautiful. Three days after her death, the only traces of her lay in a tiny wooden box and we were about to leave the box behind. I volunteered to deposit the urn in the crypt. My sister had chosen an osuary in the basement of a church. At the center hanging low was a wooden crucifix. I laid the box under the bloody feet of Jesus. With both hands on the box, I recited a Buddhist prayer I had learned a long time ago. She has taken the great leap. The light of this world has faded for her. She has entered solitude with her karmic forces. She has gone into a vast silence. And as I say the word silence, I started to cry and I felt as though I was about to break into bits that would never be reunited. Mom and I had been a unified whole. Without her, there was no me. A long time ago, I had heard a rabbi on the radio explain why Jews don't cremate their dead. He had said that a grave is a place where the soul of the deceased connects with ours, that we honor their memory by returning to the grave. Oh God, we cremated mom, we have no grave. He said that ashes are the destruction of a memory, a complete divorce of the soul from this world, an act that causes pain to the soul. I choked and began to cough and the echoes bounce off the caverns walls of the basement. Sobing quietly, my sisters kept the distance. It was a Sunday and a chill came over the basement like a shroud. I wanted to put mom under my sweater, sit with her in a corner of the Oshwari, blow hot air onto the box and cover it with my hair. I wanted to shield mom from the cold. Let her go, one of my sisters said. I stood up and pressed the box against my belly, rubbed it on my chest as close to my heart as possible. Then I carried the box with what was left of mom to her new home, little door number 07632. Holding my breath, I slipped the box into the crypt. I pushed it away from this world and into her new realm with a steady hand. The box made a shh sound as it was slid out of my life. I locked the Oshwari, put the key into my sweater pocket and let out a sigh. My sisters and I locked arms and together we climbed the stairs. We surrendered the ashes and together we crossed that terrible threshold. We stood openly to the four elements and together we faced the rest of our lives with the invisible scar. It was dark outside and it was beginning to rain. I'm all yours. No, she was good. She was good. And the irony was that she complained that she couldn't breathe and she couldn't breathe and the paramedics got tired of coming to the house and there was nothing. So the last EKG that she had, the paramedics said, you know, she has the heart of a 15 year old. She's gonna die of anything but a heart and she died two days after that. Really taken with the move to imagine in nonfiction. And I'm wondering if you could talk from your own experience why it was so important in this case to imagine into your mom's life. As children, we have very little access to the lives of our parents. They are parents. My mom was always my mom. And for me, it was important to find about the woman. When she died, I went through that closet looking for something juicy, you know, a lover or something secret, you know, a stash of pornography. I don't know. I want a grit, I want something that would make her something other than my mom. I found nothing. I found nothing. And I think in writing, I gave my mom the womaness that I missed from her. Yeah. And that's why it was important to imagine the honeymoon, the first night with that, all the trips that they did together so that I could see her as a human being, as a woman, rather than a mother. They don't speak English. It was all part of the plan. Oh, that's the truth. I started to write in about my mom's funeral probably a couple of days after she died. You get down the actual. And again, Willie, I don't wanna call it morbid because everyone has a different way to deal with loss. I wanted to learn about rigor mortis. I wanted to be able to understand what was going on in my mom's body. And it's full of enzymes and secretions and stiffness. And I wanted all of that. If I understood what was going on in my mom's body, I thought I was better off than my sisters because at least I knew what was going on. They were mourning, and I was mourning too, but I was mourning from a very different corner. Yeah, they were missing her, they felt her loss, and I was doing the same thing, but I just got very scientific about it. I just wanted to know what was going on to her body, the body that I was not going to hug ever again. I wanted to understand the physical loss. Did you get a sense of relief when you finished? How are you working through that? One of the chapters, everything else was, it was very from my heart, but probably the only chapter that gave me that sense of the revelation. It was a chapter that I wrote about finding out that I had been an unwanted child, which was not a surprise because I was number six and my mom was very poor. And I was like, I knew she didn't want to have six kids, but it was like, I'm a mother, I'm grown up, so we are more like, we are on the same level, like, hey, mom, you remember when you were pregnant with memes, oh my God, it was awful. And I'm thinking like, I don't know what I expected. I wanted the truth, but she just gave it to me between the eyes, like, yeah. So that was a pretty hard chapter, although I knew that I had been unwanted, just writing about it and coming to terms with the fact that I was not part of anyone's plan was hard. Had you never timed her? Maybe you wanted it, like you were looking for a detail that you couldn't explain or you wanted a different perspective to talk to them at all? Yeah, here's the thing. When I attended an MFA program for about three weeks, right, and one of the workshops, it became apparent that everyone had a fantastic story to write, right? We were talking about our lives, it was like, oh my God, it's so much there and it's so much here and his life and her life, it's like amazing. And I had nothing. I had a very ordinary childhood, nothing happened to me. We were just poor and loving and it was just, you know, trying to make it from Sunday to Monday. Nothing special. And I voiced this during one of the workshops and Ira said, surely you have a memory from childhood. Think hard is something really special, I'm thinking. Well, I don't know if this counts as special, but my sister brought a skeleton home. Is that kind of special? And I went like, what? And there you have it. She needed an A in anatomy and the nuns say we need a skeleton, so she just went and bought a body and brought it home and we cooked it. We peeled the guy at home and we put it together and it was like a family project. It was like... It was very bonding. Not only did we put the guy together, we kept the guy with us for a long time. So it was in the middle of a living room and then it was blocking the only window because it was a shotgun style little apartment. So it was covering the window so my mom moved it to the bathroom and every time we went into the restroom we had to spread the legs apart. And so, well, maybe I do have something. But, you know, it only goes to tell you that you do have a story. You always have a story to tell, right? Yeah, go ahead. I don't want you to describe who my mother is. I mean, she's still alive, but I still want to know before she had me, before she had any interaction with me, I want to know who that woman was. And I feel in some way that I have wrong what she could have potentially become. And in that way, I do feel guilty. And I wish I could say, you know, if it wasn't part of the plan, you know, I asked her one day that if you had a choice, and you know it ahead of time, which not happening, and she said, I'll trade everything in the world and I don't care about my sisters, I just want to become a mother. Yeah. And that part spoke to me because I've been desperately trying to search for my mother's past, but she would always hide away and say, Right, right. As part of the past that you don't need to do because it's not important, but we were talking about this earlier on. Sometimes all you have to do is ask, you know, and they're very likely to say, this all in the past, don't worry about it, what matters is 1970 and on, right? But maybe ask on a Monday, maybe ask again on Wednesday, maybe ask again when it's full moon. And nobody will know. She's quite strong, you know, persuader, and I did try out to certain month, but I have realized this, if I could somehow, but I don't want to violate what she had done. It's just, it's like asking someone to do great favor, but I don't want to violate that. Yeah, well, I can understand that boundaries. Mm-hmm, yeah. I'm a boundary, oh, I really am, I'm sorry. You can take turns. It does make a boundary. You share so much and I'm wondering if you ever had to sort of talk with yourself about how much am I going to share all my life? All the time, yeah. All the time. And do you ever feel like, oh, I wish I hadn't gone there, maybe I put out too much? With praying alone in Qatar. It was just so, it's like everything. I mean, I didn't talk about food because I couldn't find where to put it, but I would have, you know, I just wanted to dump everything there. When the piece got accepted by the son, I went, oh no, oh no, no, no, no. And to make matters worse, the little bit that was available online was the sex part, which was the one that I didn't want anyone to read. But, you know, I have said this before, this is like playing when you are, when you write memoir, you're playing strip poker, right? You can get squimaged when you're in your panties. It's like, well, I changed my mind, you know? I'm not gonna go all the way. If you're not willing, I think it's valid, you know? If you're not willing to take your panties off, strip poker is not for you. You play something that is safer. Yeah? And I, yeah, there you go, there you go. But that's the really cool thing about writing memoir, you know, that you are willing to put yourself on the page, naked and vulnerable, for everyone to see, for everyone to scrutinize you, you're just there. And there is a lot of beauty to it, to that willingness to surrender to the judgment of strangers, you know? Once one is written down, it's done. You have no control over how people perceive you over all the, all the things that you write. Your life is there. And I think, you know, the reality just from the side is that I would never be able to do it. But as a reader or a listener, there's such a feeling of gratitude that somebody else has put out so much of what we all have experienced and to sort of validate and make okay all the ups and downs and the busy stuff of our lives that we generally don't talk about. Yeah, but you know, even you're right. I mean, there is no way to, well, at least for me to know when too much, when something is too much. You know, am I saying too much of this? Should I just turn it down? Does the reader need to know this? And for me, the answer is always like, yes. Of course the reader wants to know that. But that's just me. It's just me. And I always struggle with this. I always wonder, do I need to say this? Do I need to go there? And it's sometimes it's pretty hard to, there are some things that I don't write about that are off limits like my children. And even then I have gone there a few times. Yeah, yeah. I really love the way you, I've been around people who are dying, who have died, and the way you describe your mother dying externally. And then you juxtapose it with her internal world. And I thought that was so beautiful. And you don't usually, I don't think I've ever heard anyone juxtapose those things, you know? Somebody's writing about death, you know, death of the body, unless you're, you know, you're not, there's no spiritual part. And I thought it was very beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. You're unusual. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, go ahead. I was just wondering, I wasn't sure of the timeline. Did your mom ever know that you were published of any piece of work? Never. No, she had Alzheimer's when she died. So I don't think it would have made any difference. I wasn't sure of the timeline. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. You talk a lot about finding your voice. At what point do you realize that you've found it? Ask me an easy one. Do you like tomatoes and strawberries? Strawberry is nice. I don't know. I don't know. I think you just have to go with your gut feeling. You know when you own what you write. You know it. When you open the manuscript and you read this piece and you can hear yourself and you know that it comes from the heart. And it's not only heart. You know, the voice needs style and structure and all these little things. But you can have the structure. You can learn this in the program. You can have structure and the punctuation and the musicality and all that. And no heart. And the story doesn't go anywhere. You know. You know, and you just have to be very humble in this business. Just open your heart and your mind to criticism, to suggestions too. And it's just, just open yourself. Just open yourself and just take it all in. And the worst thing that we can do as writers is to fall madly in love with other words and say I refuse to delete this because I really like that. Forget it. I mean, you just need to be humble and say maybe it doesn't belong here. If it's really good, you save it for another essay. And you recycle. You revisit later on. But in that process of being open and accepting people's suggestions and accepting your weaknesses, you find your own voice. You'll know. You'll know. It's like when you go shopping for a dress. What are you looking for? I don't know. You know, I'll know when I see it. Yeah. One more question, maybe. What are you working on now? Sex. No, again, I'm combining anthropology with literary journalism and I'm working on a cross-cultural exploration of the symbolic meaning of hymen and how women lose their virginities in different cultures. Yeah. That's what I'm working on at the moment. Yeah. I just wanted to make a comment. We've been talking to some comments about the vulnerability and the sense of exposure in memoir. And I think what Adriana does that's so exceptional, which is I think what I'm feeling certainly touched by is it's not, it's yes, it's those things as well, but it's her ability to use language in such a delicate and nuanced way that the intimacy feels even richer. And so, you know, I just thought like there needed to be an awareness. It's not just because she's exposing these very private and intimate moments, it's because of how she's doing it. If I could piggyback on that, the other thing, as I was listening, because I'm sometimes sensitive to some of that, it's not ego-driven to me at all. It never seemed like it was about, I just want to be out there, I want to look at them when people look at me or anything like that. It seems so connected and grounded in such honesty. And that's why to me it's so compelling. All right, thank you. Thank you. I'm sure, I don't know. Okay. But I noticed that I'm always growing up here. Being different was in a way that it reverted, you know, unwanted this. Do you ever have to feel that you have to prove that something was different from what most people have expected? You mean here in the States? Yes. For being Latina? Yes. When I applied to the graduate program at USF, I asked the director of the program, do you think? Because English is not my native language that I stand a chance of being accepted. And she said, no. We said we have never had anyone who's not a native speaker of English. But send your samples, you know, they're anonymous. So everyone is going to be reading, you know, a manuscript, what do you call it, a piece, but no one is going to know the name. And based on my writing I got accepted, which told me that I don't have an accent when I write, which is excellent. Right? You know, when I read stuff with an accent. But that to me was very interesting and that is probably the only time where I've had that kind of thing with language. Other than that, life has been just incredibly generous. You know, it's like all the stars are lying themselves and everything is just, it's been really good. It's been really good and people have been very welcoming. And don't take me wrong, some of the critics have been brutal. And the problem with writing memoir is that you'll invite people's opinions about your life. I want you to appreciate or critique or love or hate my work, not me, right? So I have one of the, one women who review my book said that it was a really difficult book to read because it's very depressing and it talks a lot about death. Right? Okay, that one, whatever. But one of the reviewers accused me and I felt that as an accusation of abandoning my mom. And she said that once I found out that she was ill, I should have stayed in Colombia and instead I went as far away as possible and I moved to Alaska, abandoned in my mom. I thought that was pretty harsh. Like how dare you? Just focus on my writing. Is it good? Is it not good? Do not judge my actions. But you can't control that. Once you publish something, you are under scrutiny. Just like as man put me there. Yeah.