An Alfaguara Prize-winning author presents a collection of stories that reflect womanhood in all its complexity, challenging the limits on their freedom and sexuality.
"A poignant collage of stories of women young and old, this novel from an Alfaguara Prize-winning author explores passion, bad decisions, and the scars left by relationships over time. Margarita suspects that her husband is having an affair with one of his students. Elizabeth tries to escape a shallow life of privilege in New York City in the fifties. Doris Dana, Gabriela Mistral's lover and executor, enjoys a passionate night of sex and alcohol with a childhood friend. Juliana, an eighty-plus-year-old baker, is eager to find the woman who changed the course of her life. Anne, the caretaker of a building, leaves in search of her true identity, while her mother must confront her deepest secret for the first time. With an extraordinary, and perfectly blended, mix of real and fictional characters, the past and present intertwine, they come face-to-face, and at last they question each other. One in Me I Never Loved is a compelling novel about freedom, love, sex, and the possibilities women have to discover their own limits"--
Lambda Literary: Most Anticipated Book of the Month
A poignant collage of stories of women young and old, this novel from an Alfaguara Prizewinning author explores both the need to be seen and the need to disappear.
In present-day New York, Margarita grapples with insecurities on her fifty-sixth birthday. She feels neglected by her husband, and suspects hes having an affair with one of his students. Mysteries surrounding two friends offer both a distraction and unexpected insight:
Anne, the concierge of her apartment building, has suddenly vanished without a trace, leaving Annes mother to confront a long-held secret.
Juliana, now in her eighties, is eager to find the woman who changed the course of her life more than sixty years ago.
With a seamless blend of reality and fiction, Carla Guelfenbein takes us back to the 1940s to provide answers, drawing on the intimate letters that Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral wrote to her lover and executor, Doris Dana, in the years after their first meeting at Barnard College. Struggling under the weight of Gabrielas intense attachment, the much younger Doris enjoys a passionate night of sex and alcohol with a childhood friend while theyre apart.
Far from the chaste, self-sacrificing image imposed on Mistral after her death because she never married, the characters of One in Me I Never Loved reflect womanhood in all its complexities, challenging the limits on their freedom and sexuality.
