Liliana's Invincible Summer: An Experiment in Making Grief Legible
Why was this not even nominated for an Edgar? A question for our times
cw: discussion of intimate partner violence
This year’s Pulitzer Prize winner in the memoir category is to my mind a true crime text, though not that many reviews mention that particular generic categorization. Most call Cristina Rivera Garza’s work a mixture of “biography, investigative journalism, and memoir,” perhaps skirting the unsavory and unserious connotations the label “true crime” invokes. Alas. Because the book models the best in what true crime can accomplish: situating discrete acts of lawbreaking within larger institutional frameworks, tracing the reverberations of trauma through families and communities, and experimenting with multiplicity of voice to capture the way perspective inflects our understanding and experience of violence.
The book’s central figure is Garza’s sister Liliana, murdered in Mexico City in 1990 by an ex-boyfriend—the subtitle is “A Sister’s Search for Justice”—but the project of the text is not really to investigate the case. Liliana’s friends and family, as well as the police, are certain who’s responsible. Rather, Garza imagines the book as a way to “rebuild the archive,” to supplement and replace the official (and inadequate) narrative of her sister’s death:
Without this file I am after, her experience on earth will be as good as nothing. Her memory, erased. In the future, I will tell myself as I try to escape this moment, I will say that this is when I realized that I must write. I must replace this file I may never find. There is no other option. In the future I will say, this is the split second in which I understood how writing defies the state.
The elements of the state that needs defiance are those that solidify and perpetuate the larger cultural pressures of machismo that have enabled, if not produced, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of women in Mexico. Garza connects Liliana’s attempts to resist and disentangle herself from her abusive ex with these other victims of femicidal violence, who she calls “all the Lilianas there were or there will ever be,” that were ultimately unable to escape what professor and journalist Rachel Louise Snyder calls “intimate partner terrorism.” What is so heartbreaking, and infuriating, is that Liliana did everything she was “supposed” to do in order to survive: she created and sustained a supportive community of friends, engaged in healthy romantic relationships, and went to school to prepare for an independent career. But she was thwarted again and again by her ex’s escalating attempts to control and possess her.
However, the book does not diminish Liliana to the circumstances of her death. Another powerful and moving technique Garza employs is not only including, but textually replicating, her sister’s voice and perspective. The book incorporates long passages from Liliana’s journals and letters that have nothing to do with her ex, and everything to do with the way she embraced and insisted on directing her own life on her own terms. Garza had a font designed based on her sister’s handwriting to recreate these documents, making Liliana’s presence in the book visually obvious and arresting. She also adds testimonials from Liliana’s friends and lovers in their own words, with no authorial contextualization on her part. I hope it isn’t disparaging to suggest that this choice recreates the way a podcast can allow people other than the host to articulate their own thoughts without the sort of implicit editing, editorializing, or manipulation that is present in, and a source of criticism of, for example books like In Cold Blood.
And speaking of Truman’s seminal “non-fiction novel” and its place in true crime history, Garza’s book is part of what I’ve been calling the counterhistory of the genre. I talk a whole bunch about my In Cold Blood feels in this post, if you’re interested:
Garza’s text, with its formal experimentation, commitment to the importance of personal perspective, and critique of institutional systems that disempower and endanger women, pushes back against any assumptions that an authoritative narrative of her sister’s life and death can, or should, be produced (by anyone other than Liliana herself), and instead models how true crime texts can create space for important questions about violence, as well as become repositories of grief. Garza describes herself as an archivist, archaeologist, and custodian of her sister’s story. And the book, in its multiplicity, achronology, and anger also becomes a translation into language of the primordial and aphasic “yowl” that erupted from Liliana’s mother when she learned of her daughter’s death. Garza writes that grief of this magnitude “is something that comes from another world and communicates in turn with worlds yet to be born. Whatever it is, it does not conform to a name” and whatever it is, it gathers together those Liliana loved and who loved her: “The yowling gathers us together. We are together still within that yowl.”
Program Note: True Crime Fiction will be on hiatus next week as I take a trip to Utah to visit my dad and help out with some medical appointments. Drop your fave Utah crime stories in the comments! There’s a bunch of them!
Another fascinating review Tracy! Like Aaron, I'll push this book up my TBR list. Utah? Crime story? For a fan of the Great American Novel, there can be only one.
Great post, Tracy, as always! I haven’t read the book yet, but as usual with your writing, you’ve pushed another book further up my TBR list. :)