The Book of Emma Reyes: A Memoir

“Startling and astringently poetic.” —The New York Times

An extraordinary account, in the tradition of The House on Mango Street, Child of the Dark, and Angela’s Ashes, of a Colombian woman’s harrowing childhood defined by uprootedness and migration

Emma Reyes was an illegitimate child, raised in a windowless room in Bogotá with no water or toilet and only ingenuity to keep her and her sister alive. Abandoned by her mother, she moved with her sister to a Catholic convent, where she scrubbed floors and mended garments for the nuns—and lived in fear of the Devil. Illiterate and knowing nothing of the outside world, she escaped at age nineteen, eventually establishing a career as an artist, befriending the likes of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as well as European artists and intellectuals, and being encouraged in her writing by Gabriel García Márquez.

Comprised of letters written over the course of thirty years, this astonishing memoir describes in painterly detail the remarkable courage and limitless imagination of a young girl growing up with nothing. Discovered only after Reyes’s death, it reveals a gifted writer whose talent remained hidden for far too long.

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Emma Reyes (1919–2003) was a Colombian painter and intellectual. Born in Bogotá, she also lived in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Jerusalem, Washington, and Rome before settling in Paris. She dedicated most of her life to painting and drawing, slowly breaking through as an artist and forging friendships with some of the most distinguished European and Latin American artists, writers, and intellectuals of the twentieth century, among them Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The year she passed away, the French government named her a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Daniel Alarcón (translator/introducer) is a MacArthur Fellow and one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” best fiction writers. His books include the novels Lost City Radio and At Night We Walk in Circles, which was a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award; the story collections War by Candlelight and The King Is Always Above the People, which was longlisted for the National Book Award; and the graphic novel City of Clowns. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, n+1, and Harper’s Magazine. Alarcón teaches at the Columbia University Journalism School and is the executive producer of Radio Ambulante, an award-winning Spanish-language podcast distributed by NPR.