Fall for the Book: Memoirs of the Caribbean Panel

In their memoirs set in the Caribbean, Camille U. Adams and Patricia Coral detail their struggles growing up amidst patriarchy and fraught family dynamics. Adams’ How to be Unmothered details her troubled relationship with her mother, combining Trinidad’s violent colonial history with her own family’s legacy of abandonment. Author Jaquira Díaz says, it “is a work of art, an excavation of memory, a blend of fierce determination, vulnerability, and a journey toward liberation.” Coral’s Women Surrounded by Water depicts the writer’s complicated decision to leave Puerto Rico, only for Hurricane Maria to draw her back again. Author Glen Retief says, “Poetic, intelligent, formally and culturally hybrid, and emotionally powerful, Women Surrounded by Water offers an important meditation on gender, family, imperialism, and natural disasters, amplified by factors like anthropogenic climate change and official indifference.” Carol Mitchell, author of What Start Bad a Mornin’, will moderate this conversation.

Location: Fenwick Reading Room, Room 2001, Fenwick Library.