Crying in the Bathroom

“Equal parts pee-your-pants hilarity and break your heart poignancy- like the perfect brunch date you never want to end!"--America Ferrera, Emmy award-winning actress in From the Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the ‘90s, Erika L. Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment--a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy and dreamed of an unlikely life as a poet. Twenty-five years later, she’s now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she’s still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her. In these essays about everything from sex to white feminism to debilitating depression to the redemptive pursuits of spirituality, art, and travel, Sánchez reveals an interior life that is rich with ideas, self-awareness, and perception--that of a woman who charted a path entirely of her own making. Raunchy, insightful, unapologetic, and brutally honest, <Crying in the Bathroom <is Sánchez at her best: a book that will make you feel that post-confessional high that comes from talking for hours with your best friend.

Autorentext
Erika L. Sánchez is a Mexican American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. Her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, was a number one New York Times bestseller and a National Book Awards finalist. It is now being made into a film directed by America Ferrera. Sanchez was a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2018 recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and a 2019 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Leseprobe
The Year My&#160;Vagina Broke

On a crisp fall day during my senior year of college, I called a local feminist clinic in a state of panic and described, in great detail, what was happening to my vagina. I was standing outside one of my classes, hoping no one would hear me chronicle the goings-on of my nether regions. Weeks prior I had begun experiencing an itching and burning sensation, and I very quickly concluded that I had an STD. The woman on the line was patiently reassuring me that it was likely a "garden variety" vaginal infection, but I wasn't convinced. To me, "garden variety" made it sound like what was happening between my legs was fecund and beautiful, when it was most definitely not. "Are you sure?" I asked, pacing, autumn leaves crunching under my feet. "What if it's an STD?"

Just the thought of it filled me with shame and disgust. It didn't matter that I had had sex with only one person, who was a virgin, with a condom, in the past few months. I was convinced I was a diseased degenerate. Even though I considered myself a feminist, and it was 2005, and I knew that sex-even the casual kind-was not inherently evil or immoral, I believed that God or the Universe or perhaps my pious female ancestors from the great beyond were punishing me for putting out. Cochina, I thought to myself.

For the first three years of college, I commuted to campus on the train from my parents' house. It was not at all what I wanted, but I couldn't afford to live in student housing or rent an apartment, not even the dankest of hovels. I hatched all sorts of plans and schemes to gain my independence, but the meager wages I was making from my part-time job at the university registrar weren't enough to keep me from being broke, so I was stuck living with my parents. And they weren't exactly raking it in as factory workers, so there was no possible way I could ask them for money to move out of their perfectly good house. That was some white people shit.

I'd just spent the summer leading up to my senior year studying abroad in the city of Oaxaca (on a big, fat student loan), so living at home for my last year of college began to feel absurd. I had wandered across Mexico alone, nursing a broken heart after my boyfriend of two years told me he didn't love me anymore and quickly replaced me with a homely white girl. For weeks, I partied with the rich Mexican friends I'd met while sobbing on the beach one afternoon. I drank so much mezcal that I gave myself pancreatitis and had to be hospitalized. I had lived. Now I'd suddenly be informing my parents of my whereabouts? And at twenty-one? Naw.

So early in the year, I packed my things and moved in with a friend who lived in an apartment across the street from our old high school, about a mile away. My parents were livid. Old-school Mexicans, they considered my leaving home simply because I felt like doing so a violation of my role as daughter. In their eyes, I was both ungrateful and disrespectful, which wasn't entirely untrue, but not because I was moving out. Leaving home at this age, and unmarried, was not something that any women in my family had ever done. It was a stunning and unprecedented affront. But that didn't stop me.

I paid two hundred dollars a month to rent my friend's spare bedroom, and that was half the rent. Her father owned the building, which, I imagine, is why it was so unbelievably cheap. That and the fact that the place was, unfortunately, a dump, with yellowed walls and faded linoleum floors in the kitchen.

I had outrun the roaches of my childhood only to be greeted by them once again-It's nice to see you, Erika. We missed you. The kitchen had a clinical yet sordid quality that suggested pain and desperation. Everyone looked sad and gaunt under its fluorescent light. A friend described it as "a place where people would shoot up heroin or some shit." My bedroom wasn't much of an improvement. For some mysterious reason, there was a giant broken mirror resting against one of the walls, and I never bothered to remove it despite the obvious danger. I just used it to look at the lower half of my outfits and pretended the sharp edges couldn't possibly hurt me.

I was so broke that I slept on an air mattress for the first two months. Some nights, I'd wake up flopping all over the place when it had deflated. Needless to say, I slept like absolute shit, and I would have continued to do so if one of my aunts hadn't bequeathed me her old bed. My books, my most prized possessions, were stacked on industrial shelves that were likely purloined from a factory. And I didn't have a closet, so the clothes that didn't fit in my dresser (did I even have a dresser?) were strewn all over the place. When it was hot, I writhed in bed all night without an air conditioner; in the winter, I wore layers of clothes to keep from shivering. Another friend visiting me one evening took one look around and said, in disbelief, "Wow, you live like Charlie from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." I was mildly insulted, but proud nonetheless to be living on my own with no one else's help.

With such limited income, I learned to strategize about food. My friend and I ate lots of pancakes, eggs, and pasta that year. It was then that I understood the food of my childhood: flautas de papa, sopa de fideo, Mexican spaghetti, refried beans. Starches and fats were the cheapest way to get full (duh), but it had never occurred to me until I bought my own groceries. I also drank many five-dollar bottles of wine because it made me feel so adult to buy them at the grocery store. All those years anxiously waiting to drink legally and the time had finally come. Look at me being a lady of the highest sophistication.

I affectionately called this my slut year. (Little did I know, there would be other iterations in my future.) Despite not actually having much sex, I dated frequently to get over my breakup. Rather than pausing to assess my own wants and needs, I distracted myself with men. I went out with men I wasn't even attracted to, partly out of b…