Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir

This author educates you, shares personal stories and struggles, makes you laugh and makes you cry. Want to open your eyes to different ways at looking at our Mexican culture, read this book!

This book was delightful and fun to read. I didn’t give the book a perfect score because at times it lagged a little. Overall the memoir end on an interesting level and the story picks up and unfolds beautifully.

Good condition excited to read

Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir by National Book Award finalist Erika L. Sánchez describes her journey growing up, entering womanhood, and fulfilling her dream of becoming a writer. This Chicago-based, nearly 40-year-old Chicana writes with razor-sharp humor about her misunderstandings and mishaps. She displays self-compassion for her missteps, and at the same time, she owns them.Sánchez’s opening essay, “The Year My Vagina Broke,” details a seven-year-long attempt to identify the cause of what she calls “Scared Pussy Syndrome.” Any woman who has suffered vaginal pain knows that the condition is no laughing matter. Yet Sánchez finds ways to make the reader smile when telling of her desperate attempts to find relief.Her pain is so great that, at one point, she goes to an ER. A male doctor, learning of her upcoming trip to Spain, shouts to his colleagues, “This young lady just won a Fulbright!” as she lies on a medical table with her legs splayed in the examination stirrups. While this visit provides comic relief for the reader, there is no physical release for Sánchez from her agony.Eventually, she receives a diagnosis from an unexpected source, a masseuse. Just as some people develop stiff shoulders and necks when stressed, she somatizes her worries and past traumas in her vagina. Over time, she is able to manage the chronic pain through physical therapy and meditation.There is no jesting when Sánchez writes about the humiliation this condition causes her. She describes how Chicano cultural attitudes about female genitalia contributed to her shame, “In Spanish, some of the terms for vagina include: ‘la cochinada’ and ‘la vergüenza,’ literally ‘the trash’ and ‘the shame.’ We learn that our most intimate parts are inherently unclean, that they are sites of sin and degradation.”In spite of the awfulness that some of her stories evoke, each chapter contains skillfully applied self-directed humor. She wryly says, “Mexicans joke as if it’s our moral obligation. I think this is what happens when you’re accustomed to hardships. We cope using humor so we don’t lose our shit.”At several points in the book, she delves into the complicated dynamics of parental expectations. Her parents, Mexican immigrants, she says, “worked like donkeys” so that Sánchez and her siblings could live less challenging lives. When they see her struggles, balancing her work as an emerging writer with her day job in a grinding office environment, they express concern. She writes of this dichotomy, “Knowing that I wasn’t what my parents, culture, or environment expected me to be, that I was in some ways a disappointment, I set incredibly high standards for myself.”And yet, her mother sees that her daughter is more than a willful young woman when she calls Sánchez “una chingona,” a badass woman. Sanchez realizes at that moment, “I had defied her attempts to shelter me, and she had somehow learned to admire that. I understood then that I would never be a failure to my mother.”Sánchez’s in-your-face prose doesn’t invite the reader to pat her on the head with a murmur of “You’ll be okay.” She is far from being okay with the circumstances she must overcome and writes, “Women of color are regularly praised for our resilience, but what’s too often overlooked is that our resilience is a response to so many forms of violence. For us, resilience is more than a trait; it’s a lifestyle that oppression had demanded of us. Either we adapt or we die.”This book is not for the timid reader. But for those wishing to be inspired by how one Chicana was able to become an exceptional writer, this is a must-read.

What a fun and beautiful and soul-wrenching read about girlhood and womanhood and hell, daughterhood. Full of heart and humor. (I actually GUFFAWED a few times, chyle. Lol!) Also, a book about pulling yourself out of the quicksand of mental illness while still trying to discover and stay true to who you are. Erika, sweetheart, you fought for it and will be glad to know that you did not miss your calling, my luv.