Erika L. Sánchez

For Erika L. Sánchez, success was no cure for depression, said Anna Sale in NPR.org. Five years ago, at 33, the Chicago author published an acclaimed poetry collection and a best-selling young adult novel in the same year. But even as she was being celebrated as a MexicanAmerican role model, she couldn’t shake her dark thoughts. “One instance in particular,

I go to an event in NewYork even though, that same morning, I decided I was going to end my life,” she says. “Then I talked to these young women who really looked up to me, you know? And I wondered, like, what would it mean to them if I didn’t make it?” Feeling accountable helped. And Sánchez did make it through—checking into a hospital and eventually securing diagnosis of bipolar disorder and undergoing electroshock treatment. Her new memoir details it all.

But that’s not the only story Sánchez shares, said Pamela Avila in USA Today. Crying in the Bathroom is a memoir in essays that uses blunt humor to describe growing up as an ambitious, foulmouthed, often misunderstood daughter of Mexican-American factory workers. She candidly discusses her college sex life, a date rape, an abortion that she believes saved her life, and what it’s been like since her hit 2017 novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, changed her trajectory. “I wanted to write a collection of essays that spoke to women like me: women who never fit in anywhere, women who were weirdos in their families,” she says. Her young daughter, she hopes, will one day read it, too. “For brown girls,” she says, “I just want them to feel seen—because how often does that happen?”