Madre and I: A Memoir of Our Immigrant Lives

In this moving and funny memoir, award-winning playwright Guillermo Reyes untangles his life as the secretly illegitimate son of a Chilean immigrant to the United State and as a young man struggling with sexual repression, body image, and gay identity. But this is a double-decker memoir that also tells the poignant, bittersweet, and adventurous story of Guillermo's mother Maria, who supports herself and her son cleaning houses and then working as a nanny in Washington, D.C., and eventually in Hollywood.

In one memorable scene, after realizing that her friend Carmen is cleaning the house of one of the producers of Annie Hall, Maria recruits her to take her picture as she poses dramatically with Mr. Joffe's Oscar in hand. It is Maria's defiant yet determined attitude amidst her sacrifices that allows for Guillermo's spirited coming of age and coming out.

"Guillermo Reyes's memoir is an endearing story of `one mother and one son---a pair of Chilean outsiders navigating the world together but looking at the landscape through diverging lenses. She in search of activity and adventure, and he, getting stuck on his fears and obsessions. Their common ground is the drama of their encounters with discovery, heartbreak, and passion---the explosive emotions that light up the stage of their two-actor theater, Full of compassion and humor, Madre and / is a love letter to a woman's extraordinary vitality, staying one step ahead to pave the way for her timid boy to become a man."---Rigoberto Gonzalez, author of Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa

"Candor, great wit and humor"---Horacio N. Roque Ramirez, University of California, Santa Barbara

Guillermo Reyes is associate professor of theater and head of the playwriting program at Arizona State University. He is author of Men on the Verge of a Hispanic Breakdown and other plays.