03/26/2018 A daughter probes her troubled family history and her own stormy psyche in this melodramatic memoir. Journalist Guerrero, a reporter for KPBS in San Diego, recounts her fraught relationship with her father, Marco, a charismatic Mexican immigrant who started a family in San Diego with her mother, a Puerto Rico–born doctor. Her father became a crack addict who wrapped himself in aluminum foil to keep the CIA from beaming voices into his head. His is just one strand of colorful family history: Marco’s mother had to marry his father, who raped and abducted her; a great-great-grandmother was a curandera witch, foreshadowing Marco’s shamanistic studies; Guerrero herself grapples with adolescent angst, self-cutting, dangerous men, and psychedelic drugs. (“The whole universe rushed in through every pore of my body, causing me to swell and expand at the speed of light,” she reports from an ecstasy-fueled rave.) Guerrero’s meditations on cultural border-crossings feel unfocused and unearned since her well-to-do family crosses back and forth between Mexico and the United States on a regular basis with little difficulty; meanwhile, the disjointed narrative takes major offense to minor mishaps—“Mexico wanted me dead,” she broods after falling uninjured into a hole in Mexico City—and bogs down in teary bickering between family members. The result is an overwrought, uninvolving multigenerational soap opera with some trauma and eccentricity, but not a lot of emotional power. (July)
Luminous . . . heartfelt and mystically charged.”—The Washington Post “Expressive and affecting . . . deeply researched and tightly written . . . Crux, at its heart, is [Jean] Guerrero’s love letter to her dad.”—NPR “The genius of Guerrero’s exquisite creation lies beyond her lyrical descriptions, and visceral phrases (e.g., “I had to learn to keep my sympathy zipped inside my stomach”). What truly makes this book extraordinary is the careful layering and connections. . . . It’s the kind of story you think about long after you’ve finished reading it, and the kind of memoir that seems to redefine the genre.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Crux is everything I want in a memoir: prose that dazzles and cuts, insights hard-won and achingly named, and a plot that kept me up at night, breathlessly turning pages. Jean Guerrero has a poet’s lyrical sense, a journalist’s dogged devotion to truth, and a fast and far-reaching mind. This is a book preoccupied with chasing—that is one of its harrowing pleasures—but, like all great memoirs, it is ultimately a story about the great trouble and relief of being found.”—Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me “Crux is a triumphant memoir driven by the search for home and a father’s elusive love. The twists and unexpected turns across borders are enchanting. A poignant, lovely debut.”—Alfredo Corchado, author of Midnight in Mexico “Jean Guerrero has done excellent reporting from the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Now she examines the more mysterious borders of family history and that unknown region of the heart. You will be moved by Crux —this book is powerful and true.”—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway “From the very beginning, Crux draws the reader in—Guerrero’s language is as poetic as the story is engrossing. The characters, though, shine brightest. She draws from record, history, myth, and rumor to create compelling portraits of a family navigating multiple borders as well as the complexities of love and life within them.”—Adriana E. Ramírez, author of Dead Boys “Using her investigative and writerly skills to confront her father, his past, and the magic and mystery in their legacy, Jean Guerrero crosses the familial borders that have both captivated and terrified her since childhood. Crux is intimate, powerful, and a testament to the lengths we’ll go for our families.”—Leah Carroll, author of Down City
2018-05-01 A Southern California PBS journalist explores her relationship with her disturbed, likely schizophrenic father.Things went south in her father's life, Guerrero writes in this debut memoir, when a half sister edged him out of a managerial job in the family meat business. But his newfound addiction to hiding with an early-generation computer wasn't the first odd thing he'd done; as Guerrero relates, he'd also tapped her mother's phone in an act of jealousy—but also a fairly sophisticated bit of technological hacking. A mad genius and wild thinker, he got steadily worse: "The rare times Papi emerged from his bedroom, he sat on our living room leather couch, burping, staring at the turned-off television." Then came the self-medication and the disappearances south of the border in episodes that, as Guerrero recounts them, had an alarming oddness—e.g., he wrapped his headrest in aluminum foil to keep from being zapped by unusual rays, then ran into an army checkpoint that, thankfully, failed to remark on the drugs and open bottles scattered throughout the cab. Investigating her father's madness and charting his travels, Guerrero became a little unsettled herself: "Life is an accident," she writes. "Any encounter with meaning is a delusion." Her path also included some of that self-medication and plenty of that decenteredness. Guerrero relates all of this effectively, though there's a grim repetitiveness to some of the madness. Readers may take issue with some of her suspensions of disbelief. In the end, she seems to think that it's entirely possible her father had shamanic powers and that a line of sorcery extended throughout her family in Mexico, which lands us in Carlos Castañeda territory as mediated by a few hits of ecstasy.With a little suspension of disbelief on his or her own part, even the hardest-nosed reader will find Guerrero's decidedly centrifugal memoir fascinating.
This audiobook succeeds because the author’s performance is as powerful and emotionally driven as the story she tells. Guerrero’s father, Marco Antonio, a Mexican immigrant, was an enigmatic presence. At times a genius, at times unstable, he was an erratic and elusive person whose brilliance was interrupted by numerous demons, including alcohol, drugs, and mental illness. Through it all, Guerrero never lost hope that she would discover why her father was so plagued. Guerrero superbly tells the story of her journey to understand her father, and in the process she crosses borders both real and imaginary. While it takes a chapter or two to adjust to her delivery, the result is captivating and feels like you are on the same compelling quest as the author. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
SEPTEMBER 2018 - AudioFile
This audiobook succeeds because the author’s performance is as powerful and emotionally driven as the story she tells. Guerrero’s father, Marco Antonio, a Mexican immigrant, was an enigmatic presence. At times a genius, at times unstable, he was an erratic and elusive person whose brilliance was interrupted by numerous demons, including alcohol, drugs, and mental illness. Through it all, Guerrero never lost hope that she would discover why her father was so plagued. Guerrero superbly tells the story of her journey to understand her father, and in the process she crosses borders both real and imaginary. While it takes a chapter or two to adjust to her delivery, the result is captivating and feels like you are on the same compelling quest as the author. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
SEPTEMBER 2018 - AudioFile