A House of My Own: Stories from My Life (Vintage International)

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For those of us living between two worlds, our job in the universe is to help others see with more than their eyes. While it may help to be familiar with The House on Mango Street at the very least (and if you aren't, why not acquaint yourself with a book that takes only a hour or two to read but will honestly stay with you forever? A House of My Own takes readers to many places Cisneros has traveled, from Chiapas, Mexico to Hydra, one of the Saronic Islands of Greece and where she finished writing The House on Mango Street. She and her friend rent rooms on Hydra and live the dream: scribbling in journals, collecting the local eccentrics, and enraging her publisher who was still waiting on the novel’s manuscript she had yet to deliver.

I had to have absolute quiet, and it forced me to go to bed after everyone else had gone to bed and to be a bit of a vampire as far as my schedule. Most recently, she received the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change Fellowship, was recognized among The Frederick Douglass 200, and was awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.Were the San Antonio missions rascuache because they imitated the elaborate Moorish tiles they could not afford? It was the most beautiful moment ever, as was the moment when I brought her a copy of this book to sign and she held my hand while I gushed about how much she has meant to me over the years. I think part of the fun for me of being in a house is adapting it and making it yours: changing it, renovating it, repainting it and putting in a new bookcase. I'm a long time Cisneros fan, and I'm used to waiting over a decade for her next book and then being blown away.

She goes into detail in the Greece essay about how she wrote and turned in the manuscript of The House on Mango Street on that little Greek island, and then she also describes when and where she wrote specific short stories or vignettes. p35, "No Place Like Home")At another point she talks about home being wherever she is with her pets. Cisneros is the author of two novels The House on Mango Street and Caramelo; a collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek; two books of poetry, My Wicked Ways and Loose Woman; and a children's book, Hairs/Pelitos.I kind of knew what she meant, because my father liked television, while my mother liked reading books about political science and thinkers.