Summary
A shred of black lace. A broken hand mirror. A spidery strip of false eyelash. These are the fragments left to Irene Vilar, granddaughter of Lolita Lebron, the revered political activist for Puerto Rican indepen dence who in 1954 sprayed the U.S. House of Representatives with gunfire, wounding several congressmen, and later served twenty-seven years in prison. In The Ladies’ Gallery, Vilar revisits the legacy of her grandmother and that of her anguished mother, who leapt to her death from a speeding car when Vilar was eight.
Eleven years after her mother’s death, Vilar awakens in a psychiatric hospital after her own suicide attempt at the age of eighteen and begins to face the devastating inheritance of abandonment and suicide passed down from her grandmother and mother. The familial pattern of self-destruction flung open the doors to her national inheritance and the search for identity. Alternating between Vilar’s notes from the ward and the unraveling of her family’s secrets, this lyrical and powerful memoir of three generations of Puerto Rican women is urgent, impassioned, and unforgettable.
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Excerpt from The Ladies Gallery
MARCH 1, 1954. In the afternoon, a young woman together with three men entered the House of Representatives of the United States of America and opened fire. Next day, the front page of the New York Times would show the same woman wrapped in the revolutionary flag of Puerto Rico, her left fist raised high. What the Times would not quote were her words, “I did not come here to kill. I came here to die.” An old battle cry of Puerto Rican nationalism. She would be sentenced to fifty-seven years in prison for assault and conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.
MARCH 1, 1977. On the twenty-third anniversary of the attack on Congress, her daughter commits suicide in Puerto Rico. The mother is flown secretly to the island for a day to attend the funeral.
FEBRUARY 1, 1988. A gray winter day: the daughter’s daughter becomes a suicide patient at Hutchings Psychiatric Hospital, in Syracuse, New York. Repetition informs my life. A teacher of mine once told me not to fear repetition, “Just don’t be blacklisted by it.” Well, I am the product of repetitions. Of family secrets. Every family has its own; usually it is the untold family story a child is destined unwittingly to repress, or to repeat. We inherit these secrets the way we inherit shame, guilt, desire. And we repeat.
Praise for The Ladies Gallery
“This memoir introduces us to a writer bound to make an impact...An autobiography as fantastic as any novel...It is a mark of Vilar's art that her story seems warm and alive”
—Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe
“Lolita Lebron's granddaughter, heir to the most public female embodiment of heroic self-sacrifice in Puerto Rico in this century, has written a memoir full of searing, intimate truths, silences broken open to reveal the personal costs of public myth making...A momentous act of courage.
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—Aurora Levins Morales, The Women's Review of Books
“Stunning. A Lyrical and visionary memoir of depression, Puerto Rican identity, and young womanhood”
—Kirkus Review (starred review)
“The Ladies Gallery is destined to become a legendary work.”
—Bob Shacochis, author of Swimming in the Volcano
“A beautiful memoir, humorous and compassionate”
—Suzanne Ruta, Newsday
“A hartrending and dramatic literary debut, wherein Vilar reveals the dark side her parents always tried to suppress”
—Miami Herald
“Vilar is writing about three generations of Puerto Rican women...enchantresses and destroyers, the main people they destroy tend to be themselves...But in Vilar's case, talent, coupled with intelligence, still holds the winning hand.”
—Carolyn See, Washington Post
“Startling, raw, and affecting, a painful exercise in which memoir as therapy becomes memoir as art.”
—Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer (Notable Book of The Year)
“These are postcards from the edge... heartbreaking... funny... political... breathtakingly beautiful.”
—Detroit Free Press (Notable Book of the Year)
“Profoundly moving and beautifully written”
—Rosario Ferre, author of The House on the Lagoon
“Just as artist Frida Kahlo's splintered self-portarits and diaries personify Mexico's proud yet fragmentyed self-image, Vilar's intimate accounts about herself and her family personlaize Puerto Rico's political, social, and cultural wars for its identity. The potency of Vilar's tale arises from its telling...The Ladies' Gallery can liberate readers, yet this is more than a self-help book. It is a lesson in acquiring spiritual grace and understanding from a young woman who has plenty of both.”
—St. Louis Post Dispatch
© copyright 2000 - 2012 Irene Vilar
