Her partner please give a warm savanna welcome to jacquira diaz. Thank you so much. I am so happy to be here and its wonderful to see all of you book lovers here. And thank you savanna for your southern hospitality. I also want to thank the savanna book festival and everyone who made this event possible lets give it up to the indie booksellers in the room. I love you all. Thank you for all that you do for loving books and championing writers. Because of you im here. Thank you. I want to open with a just the just a little piece that opens the book it functions like we were the girls who strolled onto the blacktop. Going towards the boards letting the world spin. The wind in our hair. We were the loud moms and the troublemakers. We were at the party girls. Hitting the clubs in height top jordans. We where the wild girls who loved music and dancing. Girls who were black and brown and poor and queer girls who love each other. I had been those girls on a greyhound bus. Homeless and on the run. A girl sleeping on the stand. On a bus stop bench. A hoodlum girl still throwing talented boys and girls in their older sister. And even the cops. Suspended every year for fighting on the first day of school. They throw a chair at the math teachers son. Kicked out of pre algebra. A girl who got slammed onto a police car by two cups in front of the whole school after a brawl with six other girls. And i had been other girls. Girls standing before a judge girl on a dock appeared the morning after a hurricane looking out at the bay like it is the end of the world. Girl on a rooftop. Girl on an edge. Plummeting through the air. And years later a woman writing letters to a prisoner on death row. This is the opening of my book. I will talk about the inspiration and why i wrote it. It took about 12 years to write and it is without a doubt the lifes work. Its about the girl of adolescence. And miami beach. About surviving depression and survival. About our parents and how their actions shape us. About losing the people we love about how we are not defined by the worst thing we have ever done. It is about my relationship with my mother. Growing up i was a juvenile offender who spent most of her time on the streets. At 11 i attempted suicide for the first time than a few months after that i ran away from home for the first time and then i started getting arrested. I dropped out of high school kept running away kept getting arrested. Kept fighting in the streets. Kept trying to die. I was also in the middle of a sexual awakening and would finally come out as gay. I cannot talk about that not to anyone not in the early 90s not in my neighborhood. It was marked by homophobia entrance phobia. And certainly not for my mother. I spent much of my childhood pretending to be someone else especially when it seemed like the whole world was trying to erase us. I spent a lot of that time hiding in books and looking for myself in stories and after i became a writer i decided that i would write about people like me. Girls and women who are black and brown and poor. And on mother. Women like my mother a white puerto rican woman who did not know how to raise or protect her black children. They would spend the entire life spending it with Mental Illness. My mother was and is accommodated woman. She was loving and abusive. She held me one minute and then it kicked my and then held me again. She was and is flawed and vulnerable. My mother was and is deeply homophobic. When i first started writing ordinary girls. My mother was a ghost. I wrote around her. Avoiding the truth. The truth was painful. The truth was that my mother broke me and she was the single most difficult subject to write about. A black puerto rican woman who carried meet my whole life carries me still. Who taught me to pray and cook and chain smoke and taught me to keep house and taught me everything i know about forgiveness. I wrote about it. A miami beach woman who tortured and murdered her 3yearold son and dumped his body in a neighborhood close to where i grew up. And spent most of her life on death row. I wrote about my mothers mother my grandmothers mercy. She hated the fact she had have his children that her grandchildren were black. She would later die by suicide. And i wrote about them. The mythical woman the legend who took her children from their bed that night. In carried them to a nearby river. Held them underwater until they drowned. And then drowned herself. And now her ghost haunts bodies of water. I read about all these other mothers any mothers except my own until a friend who read the manuscript ask after reading about five chapters where is your mother. I have to sit down with the book and take a hard honest look at the pages. Examine my life and all of the reasons i had been avoiding writing about my mother. The truth is my mother broke me in the truth is i was afraid to look to admit to see how much she had broken me. How hard it had been to find my way back to myself how easily i could be broken again. But i finally decided to ask the question and more than that to ask the question for myself. To answer it, where is my mother. To write about her to examine the relationship in a way that was honest that acknowledged all of the ways that she was real the writing from beginning to end took about 12 years i have to step away from the book several times and there were many different versions. To say that the writing of this book drains me. It would be a understatement. I gained weight, i lost weight. My hair started falling out. Ive have the worst insomnia ive have in my life. And then my grandmother died by suicide. I often needed time away from the book to take care of myself. And to make sense of what i was doing to interrogate different parts of the book it was quite the opposite. Writing this book is the hardest thing i have ever done. What kept me going. I wanted to write about people who rarely have a home in the literary landscape. I wanted to y up write about growing up poor in miami. About all of the ways that they were invisible and hyper visible and i wanted to write about my Community Without losing sight of what mattered most. We people i were that they existed. That they lived and loved, even if the rest of the world didnt see them. When i started writing this book i thought not just about how to write my story, how my story was and is connected to a larger world and what my place in that world might be. Im here because ive found that place. Thanks to a group of friends who saved me. I was struggling as a girl, as a woman and later as a t writer, struggling with how to write about Sexual Violence in a way that was honest and still artful and in a way that was just about my experience that spoke to something larger about girls. About how complicated family lives in fights and loves and i wanted to write it without pity or glory oranger. But also, more so than any of my girls, im someone whos hadaccess to education , to a program in creative writing, to fellowships and writing conferences. Its taken a lot of hard work, but doesnt erase the fact that ive had access to all of this and most of the girls in my community. The world isnt kind to black and brown girls. And the world isnt kind to black and brown women. Especially when they come from workingclasscommunities or from poverty. These ordinary girls taught me that its possible to makeour own families , to make our own tway. They helped me believe in love and friendship and hope but more than anything, after they had girls of their own, it was there girls who taught me the most important lessons i needed to learn in order to write this book. They helped me perceive the girl i had been. They helped me remember that there are girls out there who are just like i was, that my story was unique m. Atall girls, no matter their circumstance are vulnerable. This is something we share, something that transcends borders and ethnicity and race and class. Somewhere there is a teenage girl whose mother suffers fromMental Illness and addiction just trying to get through the day. Trying to come to terms with their sexuality. Id like to imagine maybe seeing herself in this book would make her life just a little bit easier. Some of the other things that i talk about in the book r , are also things that were very important to me, things that made me a writer. My father loved books. Be was a poet, we stopped writing poetry and one of my earliest memories was of my father. He took me to the funeral of one of of puerto rican protest poet and when i saw everybody gathered in celebrating his life, people who had read his books, i ththought that poets were important and that they can change the world. And i thought i want that. I also wanted this book to Say Something about access and who gets access to this world. In publishing, who gets to be up here and talk about books and it was important to me because coming from where i came from, i always felt like i didnt have enough. So it was important to talk about that and also about puerto rican history, about puerto ricos history of colonialism and its relationship to the United States and i started thinking about how to include our history in a memoir that somethingthat wasnt a history book. And how my stories connected to that story area being puerto rican i think most of us who come from puerto rico feel a connection to the island even after we left it. Even if weve never been there which is the truth. Theres a saying that a a lot of Puerto Ricans know. A phrase which comes from a poem by i forgot his name but it comes from a phone and it means that i would be puerto rican even if i wasborn on the moon. So i wanted to reach people who would never read about Puerto Ricans or people who wouldnt pickup a history book for people who do not have access to that history. Or whatever reason and make some of that history accessible to the general readers or reader who picks up a memoir about girlhood and so i tried to talk about the parts of puerto rican history and colonialism that shaped me as a woman and as a human being and as a writer. And a lot of this influence the kind of writer i became and i was always thinking of who i was writing for and in so many ways i felt like this book, even though i intended it to be as open and honest and i intended to be vulnerable, i wanted it to be in conversation with a specific group of people. Earls for like i was, certainly Puerto Ricans, black Puerto Ricans, girls who grow up in poverty and presumed to understand i was just writing about them. But i was writing for them. Something that i mentioned in the book is how i was a kid who loved to read. And i didnt have money for books so i went to the library and asked librarians give me books. And i Read Everything they put inmy hand and everything they put in my hands were books. That were written about like people and for white people and i thought to be a writer you needed to be white. And so i wanted them to understand and to see themselves in a book and to understand thatwasnt real. That we exist. That this is possible. There were other parts of this book that kind of shape in the butt at the time i thought about how i was writing howthey would make sense to the story. One of them was the baby lollipops murder that i talk about which happened in 1990. There was a toddler found in our neighborhood in miami beach and at the time, they didnt really know where this toddler came from, just that they had found his body and he had been tortured. So i saw this story on the news and it took over the 24 hournews cycle and at the time , i was 11. I was a kid but because it was on the news and on every newspaper and everybody in my neighborhood was talking about it, we all kind of obsessedabout this. And i already imagined myself a writer and so i took note and i thought about this a lot. And for weeks, i thought about this until they discovered, they found the babys mother and the story came out on the news that they had found his mother and her partner and they had hit his body and fled and part of the narrative at the time was part of what was important to the narrative at the time, outhe news made itsound like this woman and her partner , these two lesbians killed this baby and ran away they very much made it sound like being a lesbian was part of the crime. And the people who talked about this in my neighborhood including teachers and School Security and librarians ut always talk about this with either implicit or explicit homophobia and so i kept thinking about the story and thinking about it and then 20 years later, i wrote an essay of being this little girl when this story broke. And the essay was published in a magazine called the son and a woman who had been at the time working as an antiDeath Penalty activists who visited prisoners on death isrow read and emailed me and she said i know this woman that you wrote about. Ive been visiting her in prison. Shes been on death row since 1992 so i wrote back to her and asked her if she could put us in touch, if we can start a correspondence and she did and eventually i wrote to anna cardona and i told her id written about her or written a story about discovering her story on the news and she wrote back, she wrote me letters and her first letter was, she was kind of livid. She was upset that i had written about her and she said you didnt know me. You didnt know my son. What gives you the rightto even write about me . So i wrote back and i wrote back and told her my story and told her who i was and why i had written about it and how i wrote about discovering her story on the news and sort of following along with it and i was a child at the time. And i told her that i had, i would like to hear her story. Not what the newspaper said or what was on the news or what people said but the truth and i include this in the book because i think its important for readers to see i think a writer when writing a memoir to see the writer implicate themselves and talk about how they are complicit in certain violences. And when i asked her to tell me her story, she wrote back and said this is not a story, this is my life. And she put me in my place. And i deserved it. And at that moment i really started thinking about why i was writing and why i was writing it this way. And i went back to the beginning of the book and i started interrogating myself and interrogating why i was telling the story and if i had a right to tell the story considering that i wasnt really a resident of the bar yet anymore and i hadaccess to all the things , that i eswas in graduate school and the people i was writing about it and have access to any ofthat. But she really got me to think about seeing other women and writing about and thinking about the fact that im writing about real people. Theres another one that i mentioned in the book whose name i ondidnt even know who died bysuicide. And i also thought about her a lot and i included her in the book because i thought about her in thesame way. At the time, i was someone who was suffering from major depression and ptsd and anxiety and Suicidal Ideation andthinking about taking my life. Thinking of this woman as a story, as a legend. And i also wanted to include in the book how i caught myself thinking this way and to remind the readers that these are just stories. That these are real people. And that she was a real woman in 2017 Ana Maria Cardona got a new trial and i was corresponding with her for several years. I wasnt writing here all the time but i would send an occasional letter and she would write back or she would write 2 or 3 letters and i would write back and one of the things that she asked for after she let me have it because i wrote about her, then she didnt want me to write about her except they became very clear that she wanted to control the narrative. And she wanted me to go to her retrial and i did. So she was being chargedfor murder again but this time , the Death Penalty was off the table. And as i sat in the trial after having all this correspondence with her and feeling like there was enough evidence to prove that someone else waspartially responsible , reanother woman had confessed, i realized that she was lying. She got caught lying on the stand by the prosecutors threeseparate times. And i included a little bit ofthat to. Cause i really wanted the readers to think about this idea of her that i had constructed in my head and how that sort of apart because i wasnt really thinking of her as a woman. I had been thinking of this as a story that i was following as a journalist. And so there are these other moments in the book where i thought t were important to call myself out. I thought about writing about puerto rico and one of the things that ive done over the years has been to visit puerto rico and to go back almost every summer, spend time with family. I still have most of my family there and drive around and so i drove to san juan one afternoon and if any of you have been to puerto rico this building in san juan called the Puerto Rico Tourism Company which used to be a present. It used to be a prison where Puerto Ricans were tortured and murdered and somehow, the building was purchased and now its a puerto rican Tourism Company and its a place where you can get trolley mats and theres a gallery and agrand piano and alpeople take selfies. The building still has two jail cells in their original condition where people stop and take photos and when i went back to visit this building, after having written most of this book, almost all of it, and i was thinking i knew the history of this place and i went intending to see what it had been, a prison where people were tortured and where people lost their lives and yet when i got there and saw families and tourists, a woman asked me, she asked me to take a photo of her with her two children and i took her phone and i took a picture of them and then i asked her to do the same, to take a picture of me in front of this jail cell and its a moment that even at the time i knew what i was doing. Its a moment that now filled me with shame because it was like i was trying to forget and i was complicit in this erasure. I thought i needed to include it in the book, to call myself out and to talk openly about how the desire to erase history and to erase violence and who is complicit . Something that also is in the book, a lot of people have said that miami is kind of like another character. Pli dont think its true but miami is upsetting for a setting for part of the book and its atmosphere and its Historical Marker and cultural marker. And i tried to capture what was for me the real miami, not the miami that i saw over and over on tv and movies and music videos. I tried to write abo