San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Heavy family saga lightened with humor
Francisco Goldman’s “Monkey Boy,” which can easily be considered biographical, is the kind of novel that shows you real horror while simultaneously making you laugh. It’s also a novel about inhabiting the interstitial spaces between languages, cities, countries and cultures.
In the novel, Francisco Goldberg is an American writer living in Mexico and thinking about his next novel when he’s forced to return to New York City after a threat comes because of his journalism work.
While in Brooklyn, he meets a woman and seems to be on the verge of starting a new life, but he is called back home to Boston for a few days by a high school friend so he can spend time with his Guatemalan mother — he calls her Mamita — who is in a care facility and whose lucidity comes and goes. When it’s not there, she talks to ghosts, but when it’s present, she reveals bits and pieces of the family’s history. The fragments bring everything from Francisco’s recently deceased father to his past school bullies and mix them into Francisco’s present life.
Goldman does many things right in “Monkey Boy.” The first one is that he excels at that ineffable thing we call “readability,” for lack of a better word. Reading this book is like reading a family saga, a memoir and a novel while listening to an old friend telling stories about his life.
The narrative tackles themes like migration (going all the way back to Goldman’s greatgrandfather, who emigrated from Spain to Guatemala), death, heartbreak and otherness. However, the seriousness of these topics is counterbalanced by Goldman’s knack for beautiful language, straightforward prose and sense of humor. Here’s a description of Mamita’s roommate: “Mamita shares her room with a longwidowed and retired schoolteacher from Worcester named Susan Cornwall, who lies perpetually like a log cake under her beige blanket, mannish waxpink nose and myopicseeming eyes aimed up at the ceiling, her silver hair like a wrung mop on the pillow behind her. She only seems catatonic, because she hears everything and does in fact speak. One morning soon after my mother came to live there, Susan Cornwall interrupted my mother’s
By Francisco Goldman (Grove Press; 336 pages; $27) friendly chatter to shout at her: ‘Will you shut up, please just shut up. I cannot stand the sound of your voice one more second, shut up!’ ”
“Monkey Boy” is fiction that feels like nonfiction; a story of growing up a marginalized citizen in white suburbia, as well as a narrative about learning family history and the way migration has shaped the world. And it’s all carried by Goldman’s distinct style. His words will linger in the minds and hearts of readers long after they’ve turned the last page.
Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas.
What does it mean to love a child who doesn’t belong to you? This is the central question of “Stranger Care,” and by asking it, author Sarah Sentilles shines a light — or beams a heat lamp — on all the ways there are to love, be a parent and experience loss.
In prose so gripping it reads like a thriller, Sentilles describes the choices that led to the moment when she and her husband are on the phone with a social worker, saying yes to fostering a 3dayold girl. She leads us through her 30something ambivalence about children; her realization she wants a baby; her husband’s resistance; and their compromise to try to adopt through the foster care system.
While most foster parents get certified so they can care for the child of a relative or friend, Sentilles and her husband, Eric, are classified as “Stranger Care” — foster parents who will have no connection to the child they bring into their home. Their choice illuminates another truth: that society cannot survive unless strangers also care for the people we love.
When the call finally comes that there is an infant girl, Coco, who needs care, Sentilles and Eric drive to Twin Falls, Idaho, from their home in Hailey. What transforms them from strangers to parents in a moment is the
vulnerability of the tiny baby who awaits them, the sense that they are needed, essential. Sentilles describes the experience of becoming a parent exactly. Your love for your child feels infinite, but what binds you to them is their infinite need, their helplessness.
That this love story feels doomed from the start is what makes this memoir so devastating. Sentilles and Eric are told that Idaho is a “reunification state” — i.e., family reunification is the state’s priority, and a biological parent only has to meet minimum requirements. And yet, like Sentilles, I kept hoping, down to my last atom, that Coco would stay with her. Which meant I was rooting against Coco’s biological mother, who also loves her, though it’s clear she’s not the better caregiver. This is an uncomfortable feeling, and Sentilles doesn’t let herself or anyone else off the hook for it.
Instead, she opens herself to loving a child she knows she may not be able to keep. In doing so, she experiences a more extreme form of the vulnerability that is universal to parenting — the fear of losing your child, of not being there for them. What Sentilles and Eric grapple with is not the abstract terror of loss, but the likelihood of it.
How do you parent in that space? How do you love in that space? Sentilles and Eric find a way, they throw themselves headlong into it, and this bravery is astonishing and humbling. What makes this book so powerful is that by experiencing motherhood through the lens of fostering, Sentilles is able to look at the wrenching and wornout topics of parenting in a new way.
She also scorches the foster system, the random, bureaucratic terror whereby the social worker you get — one who is good at their job and cares or one who doesn’t — determines so much of the outcome for children and families, even in a system that is supposed to be governed by consistent rules. In the end, the state fails Coco — it fails her foster parents, it fails her biological mother, and it fails the child it’s designed to protect. How do you find any grace in such an ending?
Sentilles did not give birth to Coco, she shares no DNA with her, she has no legal claims on her, but this child made her a mother. She is a mother. There is grace in that.
Anna Nordberg is a San Francisco freelance writer.