by Julia Alvarez
(New York: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1997)
($18.95 in U.S.)
Yolanda Garcia -Yo, for short-is the literary one in the family. Her first published novel, in which she made "characters" out of her three sisters, her Mami and Papi, her grandparents, tias, tios, cousins, housemaids, and husbands was a big success. Now she's famous and basking in the spotlight while her "characters" find their naked and very recognizable selves dangling in that same blinding light.
So what happens?
Turnabout is a fair play. Yolanda Garcia's family and friends get their chance to tell the truth about Yo: how she's always had to be center stage; that she's been telling lies since the day she was born; about the year when she went into therapy with her best friend and how Yo swore off sex; how her college professor kept trying to keep her from ruining her life and throwing away her talent; how she stole a plot for a short story from one of her students; how she fills the house her husband built for her with voodoo offerings-"little things he musn't touch"-well, you get the idea. Everyone, from her sisters to her fame-obsessed stalker, rips into her. In the process, they create endearing self-portraits, while Yo (which also means "I") is herself denied the privilege of speaking in her own defense.
This zesty, daring novel is about what happens when an author really does "write what she knows." At once funny and poignant, intellectual and gossipy, light-hearted and layered in meaning, ¡Yo!is, ironically and above all, a portrait of the artist. And with its bright colors, passion and penchant for controversy, it's a portrait that could come only from the palette of Julia Alvarez.
COMMENTS
"¡YO!" works the same beguiling combinations as How the Garia Girls Lost Their Accents-a lively and good-natured surface over depths of serious questioning. Sisterhood, daughterhood, friendship, the pain of political exile, the complications of fame, all the hard questions are churned up in the wake of the writer's central paradox: that she must betray secrets on the way to honesty, and tell dangerous lies if she is going to dare aproach the truth."
- Rosellen Brown
"A novel of astonishing richness and magnanimity, a sophisticated work of art that is also warmly accessible to the ordinary reader."
- San Francisco Chronicle
"A portrait of the artist ... a one-woman cultural collision."
- Los Angeles Times Book Review
"About the writer and her lies, her truths, her passion - the way she uses, needs, loves, and takes, all at the same time ....she carries us along waves of laughter and undercurrent of pain."
- Elle