We stood at the threshold of the little house we had been renting from a man named Don Rubén and looked around us one last time. My sister Mago, my brother Carlos, and I grabbed the plastic bags filled with our clothes. “It’s time to go,” Mami said as she picked up her suitcase. Yet I never imagined that “not too long” would turn out to be never, because, if truth be told, I never really got my mother back. But this time, when my mother said she wouldn’t be gone long, I knew it would be different. “I won’t be gone for long,” she would promise as she pried my fingers from hers. Other times she would leave me at Abuelita Chinta’s house. Sometimes, if I promised to be good, my mother would take me along with her as she went out into the neighborhood to sell Avon products. She closed the latch on the small suitcase she had bought secondhand for her trip to El Otro Lado, and I knew the hour had come for her to leave. I clutched at my mother’s dress and asked, “How long will you be gone?” But she wouldn’t be celebrating her birthday with us. The following month, my mother would be turning thirty. īelow is an excerpt from the first chapter of The Distance Between Us. Readers can sign up for the California Book Club for free here -and buy Grande’s book here. And this book is really beautiful, and parts of it are even funny.”Ĭlub members still have three weeks to read the book before the club meets. “And it’s a journey that, I think, has been dangerously and unfairly stigmatized by everyone up to the president of the United States, which I think is unconscionable.

“It’s a classic memoir of coming to America, and its costs, and to some degree the upsides of it,” John Freeman, host of the club, said in an Alta Asks Live conversation. The California Book Club will discuss the book with Grande at its second virtual gathering, on November 19. Grande chronicles her experience of living without her parents-and eventually leaving Mexico for the U.S.-in her acclaimed 2012 memoir, The Distance Between Us. But it also hindered me because it left me emotionally scarred.” “I learned to be independent and self-reliant. “My experience of being left behind helped me because it made me strong,” Grande has said. Grande’s father had already left Mexico years earlier, hoping to make money for the family back home, and Grande knew, deep down, that she wouldn’t see either of them for a long time. “I won’t be gone for long.” Those were the words that Reyna Grande’s mother told her young daughter when leaving for the United States.

The book the distance between us