Sorry, Can't Make It To Your Funeral

von Iván Gutiérrez Núñez

564 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Sorry, I Can't Make It to Your Funeral is a literary memoir about a life formed by poverty, precariousness, and emotional instability, conditions that precede and ultimately carry the author into undocumented life in the United States. Born in Mexico to parents shaped by their own neglected pasts, he grows up in an environment where survival outweighs nurture, and where instability becomes the organizing principle of childhood.After a largely uneventful desert crossing into the United States, the author lives in a state of constant vigilance. Without legal status, he internalizes a sense of second-class citizenship, absorbing fear, constraint, and the belief that survival depends on invisibility. Poverty and illegality fracture his developing sense of self, forcing him to disown parts of his parents, his origins, and eventually himself. As adolescence gives way to early adulthood, his inner world becomes increasingly introspective and philosophical, shaped by alienation, experimentation, and a restless yearning to escape a life he never chose.As adolescence gives way to early adulthood, his interior world grows increasingly introspective, shaped by alienation, philosophical searching, and a desire to escape a life defined by constraint. At twenty-three, an unexpected connection with a Spanish woman named María Dolores, Loli, arrives on Mexico's Independence Day, a coincidence that echoes the Grito de Dolores. Though the encounter serves as a catalyst, the decision to leave the United States is less about romance than about a fractured self seeking relief.In Spain, the author enters a new form of exile. While pursuing legal status, he confronts isolation, economic insecurity, and the unraveling of the relationship that carried him there. The distance from his family intensifies the emotional cost of his departure, especially from his older brother, whose absence becomes central to the memoir's reckoning.Ultimately, this book is an attempt to understand the familial scaffolding that made such a story possible, as well as the socioeconomic and even geopolitical drama that shapes the author's complicated present. The memoir traces how survival strategies learned in childhood persist long after borders are crossed, and how freedom, once attained, can arrive entangled with loss.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798176819434
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 25.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published