Not Myself Without You

In Not Myself without You, a working-class Puerto Rican family of the 1950s lives surrounded by spirits, ghosts, and witches, a result of incantations performed in their living room. Chronicling nearly two decades of the family's history including their occult activities the story involves characters who are centered in Puerto Rico but who move through the Caribbean, Central America, Spain, and New York as they are pulled by the economic, political, and social conditions of the times and by their own intense desires. Lacking the tools to understand the complexity of the world around them, these entities often travel without clear concepts of place or time and in a constant aura of exile. As their stories come to light through fragments of prayers, sayings, poems, newspaper articles, and excerpts from books as in a family scrapbook, the characters themselves speak of intimate, political, or social issues in voices that are familiar, erotic, satirical, and humorous. Based on oral history and research, Not Myself Without You is the author's own memoir with a strong fictional twist.