A House of My Own by Sandra Cisneros
A review of Sandra Cisneros’ essay collection A House of My Own.
“For those of us living between two worlds, our job in the universe is to help others see with more than their eyes. . . . Our work as bicultural citizens is to help others to become visionary, to help us all to examine our dilemmas in multiple ways and arrive at creative solutions. Otherwise we all will perish.”
A House of My Own by Sandra Cisneros (2015). Published by Knopf.
Like many other American youths, my first encounter with Sandra Cisneros’ work was her vignette series The House on Mango Street. I read that in the ninth grade for my English class, and ever since then, I have not read a single piece of her essays, stories, poems, or novels. It’s actually tragic, because Cisneros is an important figure in American literary history, especially for Chicanas. I just never really read anything by Chicano/a individuals throughout most of my schooling, including college. I wanted to take some more Latin American based classes, but unfortunately I graduated a year early spontaneously and had to nix those plans.
This was a good book to dip my feet back into the world of Cisneros. It’s a series of essays and lectures she has given throughout her life, and a lot of them are central to fellow literary and artistic figures in her life. One of the first couple of essays is about her house in Greece, which I loved because as an architectural and material cultures researcher, that tickles my fancy in all of the right ways.
The essays really vary in length, so this is a good book to pick up and revisit throughout the week. I quite enjoyed the varied length because my attention span is actually terrible.
Content
The essays wildly vary in topic and have been distributed in a variety of different ways: some are lectures she’s given, while others have actually been published in literary spaces. I think this is a very important book to read if you’re a Cisneros fan, because you really dig deep into the influences of why she’s written what she has. She goes into detail in the Greece essay about how she wrote and turned in the manuscript of The House on Mango Street on that little Greek island, and then she also describes when and where she wrote specific short stories or vignettes.
Her background is also super interesting to read about. Her father grew up in Mexico City, while her mother is from the Mexican countryside. Cisneros herself was born and raised in Chicago and then got her MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop (literally my dream, but I don’t want to get just an MFA because I’m afraid of the career options). She describes being poor growing up and also being completely broke after her MFA because she can’t find jobs, and so she gets admin work at her alma mater in Chicago and then chooses to roam the world. Literally living my dream.
Something I absolutely loved, as someone who literally abhors romance as a creative, is that she discusses how she doesn’t marry or tie herself down with a family because she devotes herself to her craft. For me, as a female writer who’s slowly come to realize this as well, it was so validating to read such an iconic figure flat out state why she doesn’t want to get married. I always thought to myself that I wanted to devote myself to my art and craft and never marry because of it, and seeing this on the page absolutely validated my existence. Especially because everyone around me is like “you’ll change my mind.” I probably won’t.
I also really liked how she centered quite a few of the essays around her connections to fellow creatives, many of which who were dead by the time she published this collection. I thought that was a neat little element that I could genuinely appreciate, since the creative world is highly connected. Everyone knows everyone in this industry, and so reading about her personal connections to the artistic humans who came before us was heartwarming.
Writing
I absolutely love Cisneros’ writing. She incorporates some of her poetry as an essay in some of the sections, and that got me really interested in her poems. She also talks about her process so much and creating specific works that it made me want to go through her entire bibliography and read everything. I also appreciated the fact that she included images and footnotes—the footnotes will directly contradict certain things she writers, as if she’s scribbling back in the journal being like “hey past me, this has now changed.” I found that to be a neat little detail.
It also was really good that her essays varied in length. Some were about over ten pages, while others clocked in at three pages. I think if these were all consistently the same length that I would’ve lost my mind. My attention span can’t handle that in nonfiction, somehow it just implodes at every chance it gets when it comes to essays and memoirs being the same, long, drab length. Give me some spice. I genuinely need it.
The detail and eye to Mexican culture, as well as Cisneros’ classic incorporation of Spanish into her writing, was also a glimpse into a culture that I loved to see. I thought that it was quite good how she didn’t explain things, but also kept it accessible enough that an ignorant person wouldn’t get too frustrated with the onslaught of new information.
Overall Thoughts
I recommend this book! I think if you’re an avid Cisneros fan it’s worth buying a copy, but, if not, definitely just check it out of your local library like I did. The pages were glossy and felt really nice to flip and turn through on the hardcover copy, and the images looked crisp on the page. I think if you’re a fan it’s definitely a good investment for your bookshelves. The writing is good, her essay approach to memoir is pretty solid, and she offers some interesting insights to her craft and her life that allows you to really see her and the situations and settings she’s in.
