Erika L. Sánchez, CRYING IN THE BATHROOM: A Memoir

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[1:31]Erica L. Sanchez is the author of Crying in the Bathroom, a memoir, which, by the way, I could have titled my own memoir because I've spent so much of my life crying in the bathroom.

[1:40]She is a Mexican-American poet, novelist, and essayist.

[1:44]Her debut poetry collection, Lessons on expulsion, was published by Gray Wolf in July 2017, and was a finalist for the Pan-America Open Book Award.

[1:52]Her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, published in October 2017 by cannot books for young readers and was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Award finalist.

[2:03]It is now being made into a film directed by America Ferra.

[2:06]Most recently, Sanchez published a critically acclaimed memoir in essays titled Crying in the Bathroom with Viking Books.

[2:13]She was a Fulbright Scholar, a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Fellow for the Poetry Foundation, a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2018 recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation and a 2019 recipient of the National Entownments for the Arts Fellowship.

[2:30]She is the SOAR, Wanda, Inest, De La Cruz, Chair at De Pauli University in Chicago.

[2:36]And you can tell I did not speak Spanish in school, but I'm trying.

[2:39]Welcome, Erica. Thank you so much for coming on Momstone.

[2:42]Have time to read books to discuss crying in the bathroom a memoir.

[2:46]Thank you for having me.

[2:48]I actually thought about calling my book bookends. I thought about calling it crying in the bathroom because I do that so much in my book.

[2:55]Oh, wow.

[2:57]So I really think it is this gift across my desk or my email or whatever. I was like, oh my gosh, yes to this book. Yes, 100%. Thank you.

[3:07]Why don't you tell listeners a little about the memoir and why you found yourself crying in the bathroom or even the most recent time you found yourself crying in the bathroom.

[3:18]Oh, I don't even remember the last time, which is a good thing. Oh, that is a good thing.

[3:23]Yeah, wow. I was yesterday, by the way.

[3:26]Oh, do you want to share? No, go ahead.

[3:30]So I wrote this book because I like to challenge myself to write in the different genres because I love, you know, poetry.

[3:42]I love nonfiction and my love fiction. And so after finishing my novel and selling it and not knowing what to do next, someone asked me to write an essay about ambition, which ended up being the title, I say, crying in the bathroom.

[3:58]And once I wrote that I felt like I had found the next project. And so it was really exciting to to write so many different areas of my life into this book and then also incorporate different books and pop culture and, you know, my favorite feminists, etc.

[4:22]Like I, I really enjoyed enjoyed braiding it all together and I wrote the book, you know, that I wanted as I was growing up as cliche as that is, but it's true. I wanted to write about being a brown girl, a brown woman and trying to make a life for herself, a life of, you know, self-reliance and dependence art, etc.

[4:50]Yeah, it was an ambitious project and it took a long time. But yeah, I love what came out of it.

[5:00]It's great. It's really great. And your voice just like flies off the page. You know, it's great. You're funny and like a bit irreverent and it's just awesome.

[5:11]It's a it's it's really immersive. I love it's of us like a memoir and essays style writing, which I also happen to love. You start out by sharing the intimate details of your nether regions, which is always a nice way to get to know somebody.

[5:26]Yeah, yeah, it was an interesting way to begin.

[5:32]Tell me about that decision.

[5:34]Yeah, well, I'm so tired of feeling ashamed of my body, you know, and I was raised, I was raised Catholic and you know raised in this culture where like the female body was a place of sin and so you had to like, you know, keep yourself here.

[5:55]And I always rejected that notion. I thought it was stupid because men weren't held to these standards. And so I really wanted to start off on a rebellious note.

[6:08]And that was it. It's like, I'm going to talk about my vagina and you want to come along for this ride. That's great. If you don't, you better get that right now.

[6:18]You find other.

[6:19]Yeah, because it's not going to make you comfortable, probably. So I just wanted to, you know, be that like the punk kid I was in in high school and continue that that thread of.

[6:37]Rejecting the status quo and, you know, fighting against these notions of what a woman's supposed to be and how she's supposed to act.

[6:48]How is the woman supposed to be? Do we have an answer for that? Well, I could tell you what what people thought I was supposed to be like.

[6:55]Let's try. Let's start.

[6:57]I was supposed to be very family oriented, very pious, you know, church going, God loving traditional and always, you know, wait till I get married to move out of the house, find a partner who was, you know, also Mexican also Catholic

[7:22]have children sacrifice everything for these children. I mean, it goes on and on. There are so many expectations that, you know, we, we experience as women and in Mexican culture and and still here in the United States.

[7:37]We're supposed to be like martyrs all the time, right. And just don't believe in that. I don't buy it. I don't want it. I don't want my daughter to believe that.

[7:50]I want other women to think that. So yeah, I just I want to perhaps create a framework for young women to see the possibilities for a different kind of life, you know, like, it doesn't have to be the way that your parents expect you to be.

[8:10]I don't have to be the way that society is expecting you to be, you know, it's, it's really up to you. And so I wanted to encourage that sort of agency throughout.

[8:23]It's hard though to not rebel is the wrong word, but it's hard to break out against all of the expectations, which feel so firm, you know, it's like getting out of a cookie cutter.

[8:35]Wait, wait, wait, wait, you're like, pick it up and scurry out underneath or are you going to smash it off to the side. Like, how do you do that?

[8:41]Yeah, it's lonely too because, you know, not everyone's with you. Everyone's thinking you're crazy.

[8:50]The path that I took was very different from any path that my parents had ever seen. So they were very confused. The rest of my family was confused.

[9:01]You know, I was confused, but I knew that I wanted something bigger. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted a travel. I wanted to be independent. I wanted to wait to have a family if I was going to have one.

[9:12]And so yeah, it's painful because a lot of people disagree, reject you, whatever, but that's the price I was willing to pay.

[9:23]I also think sometimes when you know deep down like what's in your own heart and what you should do.

[9:30]And then you go for it. I think that makes many people feel uncomfortable because they may know and have decided like kind of not to go for it.

[9:39]So you're having this example of you. It actually like threatens their own sense of stability in a way. Right. Like, oh, if she's doing this, like, should I be doing like, well, she can't do that.

[9:53]Like, that's not allowed. You know, like, no, no, no, no, we've all agreed to this like social contract that we're going to do with this.

[10:00]But even though it's painful, why does she, why is she not doing it, you know?

[10:03]Yeah. Yeah. I do think that it causes a lot of discomfort sometimes because of that.

[10:12]And I'm like really not sorry about any of it. So that makes people feel sort of way as well.

[10:19]Well, you're not, you're not trying to hurt anyone. You're just trying to do it your way.

[10:23]Right. Exactly. Exactly. Like it's not about yeah, I don't know.

[10:27]I'm not suggesting you should feel apologetic in that. I do. I don't know.

[10:31]Yeah, I don't.

[10:33]Good. You know, I know you needed me to say that this I'm a good stranger who you never met in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[10:41]Tell me about becoming a writer. Oh, man, I feel like I was born to be a writer.

[10:46]I know that sounds really romantic, but I have always loved to read.

[10:52]I became really just enamored with poetry when I was about 12 and that changed everything for me.

[11:03]I realized that it was something that really made me feel alive and that it created an opportunity for me to feel free and to be myself and express all the things I couldn't express to anyone.

[11:20]And so poetry became like this really, really important part of my life very early on and it remains that way and, you know, for me, everything goes back to poetry and I write prose the way I do because of poetry.

[11:37]And so, you know, I was just like a very alienated kid. I loved to read books and I had all these questions. I had all these like philosophical

[11:48]quandaries. I was really into art and, you know, it was it was a lonely existence because no one else was really there with me, you know, and so poetry was my rock, I suppose, and it allowed me to feel free.

[12:05]I feel like reading, I mean, I don't know which poet I remember reading Walt Whitman in school being like, Oh my gosh, yeah, exactly amazing. I can't believe it.

[12:16]I have some of these thoughts. Like, you know, not to compare myself well, that's not what I mean. Just like, no, I know what you mean. I felt the same way about Walt Whitman specifically. I was like, wow, this whole notion of pantheism that he had. I was like, that makes so much sense to me rather than to like worship some dude in the sky. Like, that didn't really jive with me.

[12:38]And so I loved poetry because it gave me like a spirituality that was very different from the one that I was, you know, given.

[12:49]Yeah. Well, this is why books are so important, you know, the changes they change your whole life. They really do.

[12:58]They do. What are you reading now, by the way?

[13:01]I am reading what to call the family outing. It hasn't come out yet, but it's really good. I'm almost done. I did a panel with Jesse and she was really interesting. And so I started reading it. And I just couldn't stop. So I'm really into that. And also how to be an anti racist, which I think everyone should read.

[13:23]And I love how accessible the book is like, he's talking about really, you know, quote unquote, academic concepts, but it doesn't feel that way. And anyone can read it. Anyone can learn from it and change and be better. And so I find it very exciting. I feel like I should have read it already, but, you know,

[13:46]It has a new week out called how to raise an anti racist. And I just had, I just had him on the podcast. Dr. Kendi to talk about that. And like his first book, it's all about, you know, he uses all this information about his own life and his daughter, you know, how his, what his wife's pregnancy was like. And it's, it's almost a memoir coupled with all these other statistics and studies and ultimately convincing people of anything is most persuasive.

[14:17]And that's what he's done. He's like shared his whole life. And anyway, he is so bright. And oh my gosh, I would love to meet him. He seems just so wonderful. And I love the book so far. I haven't finished it, but it's, it's really opening up something in my brain. That is very exciting.

[14:35]It's awesome. Well, in the Wall Street, I'm not sure when this episode is coming out, but the day today that we're doing this episode, there's an article in the Wall Street Journal by Elizabeth Bernstein, who I love, by the way, she always writes these great columns, but today was on the power of crying and why it's so important.

[14:52]I should have said it to you before this is something that you can Google it afterwards. In fact, I read the whole article out loud to my husband as we talked about the kids off the campus morning because I was like, let's now board this is because I cried.

[15:04]I like to cry and I, you know, but it really was showing all the benefits to your body how it literally calms down your nervous system and makes you feel better and the lack of crying when you're upset can cause harm.

[15:20]I crying you open yourself up to that connection and hugging and, you know, just commiseration empathy all that that's so important for connection.

[15:31]Anyway, and then I have this crying in the bathroom and then I think I it's just like we're like in a cry fest morning situation, but it's like crying out to crying.

[15:42]No, it's great. Apparently I I'm glad to hear it because I've been crying pretty hard for like 30, seven years.

[15:50]Well, what are you working on next?

[15:57]Well, I am working on poems which I've neglected for a little bit because of all these revisions and all these, you know, obligations, but poetry is where my heart is so I have to go back to it.

[16:11]I'm feeling really good about what's coming together and also I have two competing ideas for a novel not young adult and I want to see which one reveals itself to me first and so I'm, I'm just trying to like, you know, relax right now because of my tour, you know, I have so many things to do the books about to come out.

[16:37]I'm going to be just going to be in production soon and so yeah, I'm trying to take it easy. No, no pressure on myself. Also a children's book.

[16:46]Yeah, I've been working on that, but that also is something that I am going to take my time with and just really enjoy the process.

[16:55]Yeah.

[16:58]I think I always tell young writers that they need to make friends with rejection and rejection is simply a part of being a writer and they can't just give up when they're rejected because this is going to happen a lot.

[17:16]I think that is really important and not to take it personally. I mean, I've been rejected tons of times my novel was rejected a lot.

[17:25]My poetry was rejected a lot, you know, it just took like a belief in the work and then also just this determination to have it published at any cost.

[17:40]And so just be really persistent, but also focus on the craft of the work first, make it the best possible thing that you can make it and then worry about the selling of it, you know, like it's important to really enjoy it because otherwise it's not worth it.

[18:01]It really isn't because it's kind of a nightmare of a career.

[18:09]It's a way to inspire everybody. Thank you for that.

[18:13]But do it if you love it. Do it if you want.

[18:18]Okay. Thank you so much, Erica. This is so fun. Congratulations on your book. Thank you for sharing and enabling somebody others to share and, you know, if people are uncomfortable, that's okay.

[18:31]Sometimes that's what they're supposed to be to make them rethink things. So it's okay. Exactly.

[18:36]Awesome. We'll just have a look and it was great to connect.

[18:40]Take care. Bye-bye.

[18:42]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.

[18:46]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zibioens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.

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[18:58]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan in fact, Texture Sound for the Sound Editing.

[19:02]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.