A brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture—from Beyoncé to Game of Thrones—to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by migration and colonialism.
Upon becoming a new mother, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was called to Mexico to reconnect with her ancestors and recover her grandmother’s story, only to return to the sudden loss of her marriage, home, and reality.
In Magical/Realism, Villarreal crosses into the erasure of memory and self, fragmented by migration, borders, and colonial and intimate violence, reconstructing her story with pieces of American pop culture, and the music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.
The border between the real and imagined is a speculative space where we can remember, or re-world, what has been lost—and each chapter engages in this essential project of world-building. In one essay, Villarreal examines her own gender performativity through Nirvana and Selena; in another, she offers a radical but crucial racial reading of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones; and throughout the collection, she explores how fantasy can help us interpret and heal when grief feels insurmountable. She reflects on the moments of her life that are too painful to remember—her difficult adolescence, her role as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, her divorce—and finds a way to archive her history and map her future(s) with the hope and joy of fantasy and magical thinking.
Magical/Realism is a wise, tender, and essential collection that carves a path toward a new way of remembering and telling our stories—broadening our understanding of what memoir and cultural criticism can be.
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Vanessa Angelica Villarreal’s Magical/Realism is the impossible book that does so much so well and still retains a distinct and propulsive voice. Villarreal’s formal variousness illuminates and usefully complicates her subjects, but the bedrock upon which she engages her intellectual might is a big beating heart—there are lines here that made me, a non-crier, actually well-up. About her father who taught himself to play guitar while his migrant laborer parents worked, Villarreal writes: ‘He was not a rare mind dreaming in a place that suppresses dreams with debt and labor. What is rare is that he almost made it.’ Often, for Villarreal, tenderness presents itself as a kind of rage, a rage that emerges from an ability to perceive the interiority of the harmed. Our loss, how rare this rage—without any accompanying smug back-patting—feels in the contemporary critical discourse. Our luck, to find in such abundance here.
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Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!