![]() Her efforts to find her true voice are described throughout, but never so charmingly as in "Of Maids and Other Muses," where she tells about her sojourn at Yaddo, a writers' colony. "(F)amily was the only neighborhood and country of origin I knew," she says, "and so it matters in a way that nothing else has since, except the writing." (In retrospect, she recognizes the menace of those years.) There, as adolescents, she and her sisters felt culturally and linguistically adrift (although they spoke English). She lived what seems to have been a romantic childhood of summers at the beach and winters in the city, until her father's involvement in revolutionary schemes against the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo sent the family on a journey of escape to New York. Nearly half the essays treat the subject of her family history, on which she drew for her lyrical and vibrant novels, "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" and "!Yo!" After all, the very impulse for the book came from the many questions readers have posed. Her readers will surely be interested in her inspirations and motivations for writing. This is not to deny the pleasure of Alvarez's writing. ![]() In short, a revision instead of a collection. One longs for a more coherent organization and deeper insight into fewer, more-focused subjects. Our interest in a particular aspect of the author's thinking is sparked, then set aside for another topic. Taken one by one, most of the essays are delightful, but books of occasional essays pose problems for the reader. The second section, "Declarations," expands on ideas from the first that are relevant to her writing life, as well as talking about the writing process. ![]() The first section, "Customs," focuses on her childhood in the Dominican Republic and her family's escape to the U.S. ![]() "Something to Declare" collects two dozen essays originally published in magazines, newspapers and anthologies. ![]()
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