Esmeralda Santiago - The Turkish Lover

Praise for The Turkish Lover

There is considerable suspense in watching and waiting for her eventual escape. [Santiago] has forged a remarkable life and career that readers cannot help but follow.

Washington Post Book World

Esmeralda Santiago, one of the premiere female writers, has written a muchanticipated third memoir, The Turkish Lover, charting the stormy journey of her twenties.

New York Post

Santiago writes in an honest voice whose clarity lends itself to the emotional telling of this act of rebellion that catapults her along a path where she loses herself before emerging independent, strong and free.

Milwaukee Sentinel

Tells the tale of passionate love and self-liberation, while brilliantly recounting the life of an emerging writer on the brink of adulthood.

Ms.

Santiagos style is pragmatic, emotional, funny, upsetting, sympathetic and thoroughly entertaining.... The book is a fine chronicle of that time in your life when growing up means having some growing pains, and independence comes at a price thats high, but worth paying.

Detroit Free Press

Just a few chapters inside of Esmeralda Santiagos latest memoir, The Turkish Lover, readers will feel like grabbing the author by the lapels and giving her a good stern talking-to. The talented writer, who mined the rich cultural terrain of her immigrant childhood in When I Was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman, has returned to lay bare her torturous affair with a man I barely knew, whose name reshaped my face every time I spoke it.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

El hombre que yo amo/ The man I love

The night before I left my mother, I wrote a letter. Querida Mami, it began. Querida, beloved, Mami, I wrote, on the same page as el hombre que yo amo, the man I love. I struggled with those words, because I wasnt certain they were true. Mami understood love, so I used the word and hoped I meant it. El hombre que yo amo. Amo, which in Spanish also means master. I didnt notice the irony.

I sealed the envelope, addressed it formally to Seora Ramona Santiago and, on my way out early the next morning, dropped it in the incoming delivery box by the front door. It was a Tuesday, Mami would check for mail in the early afternoon and by then, Id be in Florida with my lover, el hombre que yo... amo.

I carried little. A battered leather bag once used for dance costumes now held a couple of changes of clothes, a bikini, a toothbrush, comb and hairpins, a pair of shoes and sandals, underwear. I left my tights and leotards, makeup, the showy jewelry that added spice and color to the characters I created on stage.

When I stepped onto the sidewalk, I resisted the urge to look back, to run back into the rooms where my mother, my grandmother, my ten sisters and brothers, my aunt and cousins slept. The stairs to the train station, a long block from our front door, were under my feet sooner than I would have wanted. Once I took the first step into the subway out of Brooklyn, my life changed irrevocably. Had I turned around and run back into my mothers house, into the safe, still-warm space next to my sister Delsa, it would have been too late. When I wrote the words, el hombre que yo amo, it was already too late. I had made a choicea man over my family. Even if I didnt follow him to Florida, Id taken the first step, a week after my twenty-first birthday, into the rest of my life.

That is not good, Chiquita.

I knew little about him. He was Turkish, lived alone in a luxury apartment building a block from Bloomingdales, wore expensive suits in muted colors with finely detailed pleats and seams. Hed traveled extensively and boasted friends all over the world. In addition to his first language, he spoke fluent German and French, but his English was heavily accented and hesitant. He had won the Golden Bear at the 1964 Berlin International Film Festival for Susuz Yaz, a black-and-white film made in Turkey, which he was desperate to distribute in the United States.

His name, Ulvi Dogan, sounded so foreign from my tongue, that it was sometimes difficult to pronounce it. That initial vowel made it awkwardnot the rounded Puerto Rican u nor the puckered, sharp English u, but a sound halfway in between, a strangled diphthong.