![]() ![]() She describes how she chooses which story to tell, why some of her projects have been stillborn, and how her career as a well-known writer living in the United States has "played" (and not played) with her extended family in the Dominican Republic. She talks openly about the personal sacrifices she has made for writing. In the second half of Something to Declare ("Declarations"), Alvarez tackles the business of writing itself. Alvarez's mother tries to keep her four girls from plunging headlong into a culture that mocks the rules of the old world and la familiaĆ³a land of private schools, rebellion, boyfriends, bell-bottoms, marriages, divorces, and careers as farfetched as a that of a writer living in Vermont. ![]() Alvarez's doctor father is a lone, proud man among five women at peace with his family and yet rooted in his culture's code of male privilege and domination. Few contemporary authors have written as keenly about the relationships between sisters, and between daughters and fathers and mothers as Alvarez does. She writes: "What surprises me is to discover how much of my verbal rhythm, my word choices, my attention to the sound of my prose comes from my native language as spoken by la familia." Alvarez's family is ever present in these essays. Conversely, in the essay, "Family Matters" Alvarez describes how Spanish remains a strong influence on her writing. In the essay "My English," she describes how English went from being what her parents spoke to keep secrets from her to her ticket into a new world and a career. In the first section ("Customs"), Alvarez describes first hearing the strains of the language that would become the lingua franca of her writing in her U.S.-educated diplomat grandfather's perfectly enunciated English. In this two-part collection of essays, Alvarez chronicles her abiding passions: the drama of family and history, and the art of writing. ![]()
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