Author’s life in Ecuador and Norwalk inspires new memoir
Since Victoria Buitron was five years old, her life has been divided between Ecuador and Norwalk. Her transitions and adaptations to two different countries and ways of life inspired her latest memoir “A Body Across Two Hemispheres: A Memoir in Essays.”
When Victoria Buitron was five years old, her family moved to Norwalk from Ecuador. Her life changed and she had to adapt to a new country, new language and new way of life. Ten years later, after her grandfather got sick, her family decided to move back to their home country.
“My dad decided to leave everything behind and go back to Ecuador to be with my grandfather, which meant that we all went back. That really changed my life,” said Buitron. Before moving back, Buitron was planning to graduate high school in Norwalk and go on to college. Rather, she got back to her hometown Milagros and started an adapating journey, the second one in her life.
Seven years after leaving Connecticut, Buitron came back to the U.S., but this time she knew she wanted use her unique experiences for storytelling. Her journey from moving back and forth between South and North America inspired her recently published memoir. Divided in three parts that represent the times she has moved countries, Buitron’s memoir tackles her personal struggles through asynchronous essays. “A Body Across Two Hemispheres,” published in late March, was awarded the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize.
One of Buitron’s favorite stories in her memoir is one that happened she was a teenager. She and a friend skipped out on paying taxi fare; they ran away from the car.
“That may seem like a terrible example but there’s so many layers to that moment,” said Buitron, who added that her taxi-ditching experience was not only a coming out of age moment but one that exemplified her status in American society, that included struggles but also privileges.
Writing a memoir also requires a great amount of emotional weight, she said. While revisiting experiences of her past, Buitron would often tap into painful memories.
“I had to excavate moments from my past that weren’t necessarily the happiest moments while I was living them,” said
Buitron, mentioning that there are some essays that she is not ready to read out loud yet during public book readings.
Four years prior to the publishing of her memoir, Buitron decided to take her next step in her career and get her Masters of Fine Arts at Fairfield University. She applied to the master’s program knowing that she wanted to fully dedicate her time to finish her memoir, but it was also during Fairfield University that she started to look for her community.
“I had this idea of what it meant to be a writer. For example, [I thought] a writer was probably a professor in academia but a day job doesn’t fit that role. As a Latinx, I was like, ‘How do I find my community? How do I feel at home?,” said Buitron. She began researching for literary magazines that have Latino or people of color as editors.
During her career as writer and editor, having worked with literary magazines such as Brevity and Causeway Lit, Buitron tried to uplift other writers of color, she said. In the near future, Buitron will continue writing; she has both poetry and short stories in her mind. But first, she wants to savour this moment as much as possible because publishing her memoir was a dream come true, she said.