Not for Everyday Use

A Memoir

Media Type:Audiobook
Genre(s):Biographies & Memoirs
Family & Relationships
Narrator(s):Elizabeth Nunez
ISBN:9781666598780
Publish Date:04/15/2014
Run Time:7 Hours, 34 Minutes
Language:English
Publisher:Dreamscape Media

Audiobook

Tracing the four days from the moment she gets the call that every immigrant fears to the burial of her mother, Elizabeth Nunez tells the haunting story of her lifelong struggle to cope with the consequences of the ‘sterner stuff’ of her parents’ ambitions for their children and her mother’s seemingly unbreakable conviction that displays of affection are not for everyday use. But Nunez sympathizes with her parents, whose happiness is constrained by the oppressive strictures of colonialism, by the Catholic Church’s prohibition of artificial birth control (which her mother obeys, terrified by the threat of eternal damnation), and by what Malcolm Gladwell refers to as the ‘privilege of skin color’ in his mother’s Caribbean island homeland where ‘the brown-skinned classes…came to fetishize their lightness.’