The Body Papers: A Memoir

by Grace Talusan

Overview

Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan’s critically acclaimed memoir The Body Papers, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse.

Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that her family’s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were “illegal.” Family, she’s told, must be put first.

The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remove her breasts and ovaries. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher. On a fellowship, Talusan and her husband return to the Philippines, where she revisits her family’s ancestral home and tries to reclaim a lost piece of herself.

Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of this debut memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating such abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632061843
Publisher:	Restless Books
Publication date:	04/09/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	291,419
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. A graduate of Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine, she is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Talusan teaches at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts and is a longtime member of GrubStreet. She is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. The Body Papers, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, is her first book.

Grace Talusan is an immigrant from the Philippines. She teaches nonfiction writing in the English Department at Brown University. She has received support from United States Artists, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Brother Thomas Fund, the Fulbright, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council with residencies at Ragdale, Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, Mass MOCA, and others. The Body Papers won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and was recognized by the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center with the Beacon Award. Talusan graduated from Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine, and is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

Editorial Reviews

…[a] precise, delicately constructed memoir-in-essays…The Body Papers doesn't track a one-way march to triumph from adversity; Talusan's essays loop in on themselves, as she retrieves old memories and finds unexpected points of connection…Talusan describes [her] experiences with unadorned prose that conveys a startling specificity…This [is an] indelible book. Talusan has the instincts of a storyteller, teasing out her narrative through images and allusion.

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

Much of Grace Talusan's memoir, The Body Papers, will be familiar to any reader of immigrant narratives. But what renders the book memorable…is the author's unstinting self-portrait. We see Talusan clearly in the present, warts and all, precisely through the stark, lucid representations of herself in the past…[In] powerful, evocative scenes…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.

The New York Times Book Review - Luis H. Francia

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 she’s 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. It’s clear that telling her story with such openness and perceptiveness, is part of that ongoing process.”

—Jenny Shank, Barnes & Noble Blog

Barnes & Noble Blog - Jenny Shank

“But what renders the book memorable — perhaps what earned it the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing — is the author’s unstinting self-portrait…. At the doctor’s 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, New York Times Book Review

Luis H. Francia

In The Body Papers, Grace Talusan takes us to the space between what official documents say and what the body's cells know—the understated prose startles with its beauty, the insights it provides are priceless.”

—Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of Somebody's Daughter

Marie Myung-Ok Lee

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 who—like the best memoirists—transcends the personal to speak on a universal level.”

Celeste Ng

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

Electric Literature - R. O. Kwon

Grace Talusan’s 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

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

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

Booklist - Terry Hong

This gorgeous, slim memoir is about so many things—being in a body that survives immigration, violence, cancer… this memoir will peel you back sentence after sentence, leaving your nerve endings grateful for the body that wrote it.”
—Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk and The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing

Mira Jacob

Grace Talusan’s 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 trauma — sexual 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 what’s happened in the past, as well as moving into the future with gratitude, wisdom, and strength.”

—Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe - Nina MacLaughlin

There is so much to admire in this brave and fierce and deeply intimate memoir. By taking such an unsentimental and plainspoken approach to her material, Talusan simply demands that the reader pay attention. The Body Papers is told in thematic sequences in which the author and the family come continually to light, in flashes that get brighter as we read, and by the end we see everyone in their full humanity and 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.”

Christopher Castellani

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 silence—a 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

Mia Alvar

"Grace Talusan’s 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."

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

04/01/2019

Talusan (English, Tufts Univ.) relates a life of trauma but also faith and family love, which have helped her persevere. In the 1970s, her family moved to the United States from the Philippines. The author recalls key events in her life from that time up to more recent years and does not shy away from unpleasant memories, instead presenting an honest account of her experiences with racial bias, abuse, and health problems. Growing up near Boston, Talusan was the only person of color in her school. She appeared to belong to a loving Catholic family, but for seven years, beginning at age eight, her paternal grandfather secretly molested her whenever he visited the family. Despite counseling, deep depression haunted Talusan for years. As a young woman, she learned she carried a genetic mutation for breast and ovarian cancer and, relinquishing her wish to become a mother, had elective surgery. Talusan's story ends on a positive note, as she writes of a cultural homecoming when she and her husband spent time in the Philippines on a Fulbright Scholarship. VERDICT This transformative memoir will especially appeal to readers who have experienced some of the trials Talusan discusses.—Caren Nichter, Univ. of Tennessee at Martin

Library Journal

2019-02-04

A Filipino-American writer's debut memoir about how she overcame a personal history fraught with racism, sexual trauma, mental illness, and cancer.

When Talusan (English/Tufts Univ.) and her student-parents moved from Manila to Chicago in the mid-1970s, they never dreamed they would eventually settle in Boston and live a traditional version of the American dream. Her father, Totoy, went on to enjoy a successful medical career, and the family joined the middle class; however, success was both fragile and costly. When Totoy's student visa expired, the family lived for almost a decade in the shadow of possible deportation. In school, teachers mistook Talusan for Chinese and misrepresented her Filipino heritage. Yet the author thrived, both in the classroom and at home. Then a pedophilic paternal grandfather, whom the author later learned had done "monstrous things to three generations of his family," began to live on and off with the family. Sexually abused from ages 7 to 13, the author suffered severe trauma that manifested in mysterious skin ailments and, later, insomnia, night terrors, nightmares, dissociation, and suicidal depression. Despite the learning difficulties her inner turmoil caused, she still managed to graduate from Tufts University. During college, Talusan learned that three maternal aunts had been diagnosed with breast cancer while another had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. When she reached her mid-30s and was considering starting a family of her own with a husband she adored, the author voluntarily chose to have a double mastectomy. Later on, she opted for an oophorectomy that ended her dreams of motherhood. A return to the Philippines followed. Once in Manila, the author began a new quest to recover those lost parts of herself that had haunted her "like the insistent ache of a phantom limb." Moving and eloquent, Talusan's book is a testament not only to one woman's fierce will to live, but also to the healing power of speaking the unspeakable.

A candidly courageous memoir.

Kirkus Reviews