Grace Talusan - The Body Papers

Grace Talusan writes eloquently about the most unsayable things: the deep gravitational pull of family, the complexity of navigating identity as an immigrant, and the ways we move forward even as we carry our traumas with us. Equal parts compassion and confession, The Body Papers is a stunning work by a powerful new writer wholike the best memoiriststranscends the personal to speak on a universal level.

Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere

[A] precise, delicately constructed memoir-in-essays.... The Body Papers doesnt track a one-way march to triumph from adversity; Talusans essays loop in on themselves, as she retrieves old memories and finds unexpected points of connection.... Talusan describes such experiences with unadorned prose that conveys a startling specificity.... Such commentary, while righteous and earned, is not the point of this indelible book. Talusan has the instincts of a storyteller, teasing out her narrative through images and allusion.

Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

The Body Papers is an extraordinary portrait of the artist as survivor. From a legacy of trauma and secrecy spanning oceans and generations, Grace Talusan has crafted a wise, lucid, and big-hearted stand against silencea literary lifeline for all who have endured profound pain and hope to be seen and loved through it.

Mia Alvar, author of In the Country

Grace Talusans finely-wrought and eloquent memoir, The Body Papers ... was the winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. The book is visceral, bodily, and throbs with pain and traumasexual abuse by a family member, cancer, the phantom-limb ache of an outsider in a foreign land, and later, as an outsider in the homeland. In less skilled hands, it all might be too much to bear, but Philippines-born Talusan... brings us along in spare, specific, sense-rich detail, and reveals, along the way, the power to be found in giving a name to the unnamable, in giving language to subjects and experiences that defy it. Therein, Talusan shows, one can find the possibility of healing whats happened in the past, as well as moving into the future with gratitude, wisdom, and strength.

Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe

But what renders the book memorableperhaps what earned it the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writingis the authors unstinting self-portrait.... At the doctors office, she weeps for the children she will never have, assuaged only by the unshakable love between her and her husband. In such powerful, evocative scenes as this one, The Body Papers comes fully alive. Now a lecturer at Tufts University, Talusan chronicles that fraught passage from one world, one body, to another, marking with sensitivity how an American life can be both burden and benediction.

Luis H. Francia, The New York Times Book Review

Awarded the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Talusan bravely alchemizes unbearable traumas into a potent memoir remarkably devoid of self-pity, replete with fortitude and grace.

Terry Hong, Booklist

A Filipino-American writers debut memoir about how she overcame a personal history fraught with racism, sexual trauma, mental illness, and cancer.... Moving and eloquent, Talusans book is a testament not only to one womans fierce will to live, but also to the healing power of speaking the unspeakable. A candidly courageous memoir.

Kirkus Reviews

Grace Talusan makes use of immigration papers, legal certificates, and medical test results in her memoir about immigration, trauma, and illness. The winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for Nonfiction, The Body Papers is timely and compelling.

R. O. Kwon, Electric Literature

Grace Talusans The Body Papers is one of the fiercest and most intimate books I have ever read. It is a memoir of immigration, of multiculturalism, of family betrayals and loving binds, and deeply a memoir of the body: about the documents and silences that regulate it, and the memories and emotions that live inside it. Talusan has written an urgent and necessary testament for our time. Reading it left me raw. Reading it will change you.

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder & A Memoir

In this moving, clear-eyed memoir, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, she probes the events of her life, documenting them with photographs and official papers. She involves the reader in her quest to make sense of who she has become by charting where shes been.... The portrait Talusan creates of her father, Totoy, is one of the most complex and beautiful parts of the book.... Talusan is still working on healing. Its clear that telling her story with such openness and perceptiveness, is part of that ongoing process.

Jenny Shank, Barnes & Noble Blog

In The Body Papers , Grace Talusan takes us to the space between what official documents say and what the bodys cells knowthe understated prose startles with its beauty, the insights it provides are priceless.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of Somebodys Daughter

Grace Talusan is honest and elegant about some of lifes most difficult moments.... and it isnt only her own story, as she writes in her authors note: While everyone has the right to report their own lives, I know that telling my secrets impacts other people. Yet ultimately, she concludes that she wrote the book for herself, and for you, the living, and for those who come after [her]. For that, we the living are grateful.

Ilana Masad, Nylon

In The Body Papers , Grace Talusan positions her memoir as a series of bodies: the body of the family, the body of a city, the body of a culture and a heritage, and all link inextricably back to the personal body that Talusan inhabits. The topics she explores are numerous, which could become overwhelming if not for her undaunted prose, the connections drawn between images. The memoir itself becomes a bodymany parts cooperating, an alliance of movement. It would be too simple to say this is a brave book. Talusan guides us, so we see what must be seen about how a body survives, the danger from within and without.... But in each of these narratives, Talusan finds a way to reflect on love, community, and responsibilityeven in their most broken, desperate forms.... With The Body Papers , Talusan offers to cross with you, through distress and danger, always moving the body forward.

Joy Clark, The Arkansas International

In eloquent and oftentimes profound prose, Talusan examines her actions and the actions of others around her without self-pity, without assigning blame, and ultimately embraces big-hearted gratitude. And we, the readers, especially Filipino and Filipino-American readers, are equally grateful for Talusans gift of prose, of self-examination, of sharing her journey. Most importantly, we are grateful that she has paved the way for others to break the silence and become empowered through the written word.

Patty Enrado, Positively Filipino

There is so much to admire in this brave and fierce and deeply intimate memoir, most notably the authors unsentimental and plainspoken approach to her material. There are no fireworks of language here, no false flourishes designed to obscure or somehow extract beauty from the events she recounts with unflinching clarity. Talusan simply demands that the reader pay attention: to make the rich and often devastating connections among the events of her life: some harrowing, some tender, all of them delivered with honesty and forthrightness. The memoir is told in thematic sequences in which the author and the family come continually to light, but only in flashes; these flashes get brighter as we read, and by the end we see everyone in their full humanity, and we fully comprehend the depths of both despair and love at their core. As a child of immigrants, I found much to relate to in the family dynamics -- alternately laughing and shuddering with recognition.