A House of My Own: Stories from My Life (Vintage International)

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In the introduction, Cisneros explains that the book is a way to understand her life over three decades--from 1984 to 2014 to be exact. But they forget to mention that a part of them is born in you, not immediately, I’ve learned, but eventually, and gradually. The writing is good, her essay approach to memoir is pretty solid, and she offers some interesting insights to her craft and her life that allows you to really see her and the situations and settings she’s in.

People, books, education and experiences influence and broaden her worldview, but also bring bittersweet loss . The book's atypical form offers a truer portrait of Cisneros than might be found in a conventional autobiography. Cisneros revisits and refines many many essays and speeches from her illustrious career; she illuminates many many facets of her life that I had not previously known about her. They are "occasional" pieces, written for specific events since she published The House on Mango Street.

It’s actually tragic, because Cisneros is an important figure in American literary history, especially for Chicanas. With her newest book Cisneros fans will finally find out whether Esperanza's story was based on the author's real experience. Or content-wise its about revealing the heinous; and the struggle to crack the code of whatever is deep and dark and repressed. Homes feature in many pieces: the apartments her family moved into, always looking for cheaper rent; the house they finally bought, where the author had a closet-sized bedroom; her house in San Antonio that she painted purple, raising objections from the city's Historic and Design Review Commission.

describes her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), as a series of discrete vignettes that could be read as a whole "to tell one big story…like beads in a necklace. In asking these and other questions that most of us would like to ask, by opening up the oft-overlooked, Cisneros enlarges our view of the world. Long-time fans will recognize her inimitable style that frequently spirals into lush sensory language. And I did that because when you don't have a room of your own, you create a time of your own, a space of your own. And we can celebrate our culture and experiences through our writing, and that's what Cisneros did without worrying about how her work would be perceived by those who didn't know, or didn't care to understand, her culture and experiences.Her mother dreamed of being an artist, and had the talent, but was never able to see that dream through—it is not much of a leap to see a young Cisneros taking heed of her mother’s unhappiness and going out of her way to avoid the things that made her unhappy (marriage and children). I waited years and years and years, it seems, for Cisneros to finally release Caramelo, her third major work of fiction, before mostly falling away from the publishing scene. She and her friend rent rooms on Hydra and live the dream: scribbling in journals, collecting the local eccentrics, and enraging her publisher who was still waiting on the novel’s manuscript she had yet to deliver. The title of Sandra Cisneros’s new book, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, echoes that of the 1984 novel that brought her literary fame, The House on Mango Street.

My favorites were: Hydra House, Only Daughter, I Can Live Sola and I Love to Work, Tapicero's Daughter, A White Flower, A House of My Own, The Girl Who Became a Saint: Teresa Urrea, and A Borrowed House.

With this collection--spanning nearly three decades, and including never-before-published work--Cisneros has come home at last.