In an excerpt from memoir, Crying in the Bathtub, on Lit Hub, Erika L. Sánchez talks about writing the book she wanted to read, with characters she wanted to see. “I grew up thinking I didn’t matter, that no one cared what I had to say,” Sánchez writes. “I rarely found portrayals of anyone like me—bookish and poor and surly and Brown—in the art that I enjoyed.”
Growing up poor and in a strict household, writing was Sánchez’s escape. “All I needed was a pen and paper,” she says. “Writing was the cheapest way to feel free. I was scrutinized and controlled at home, and the blank page offered me endless possibilities, a vehicle to create another reality for myself.” A high school English teacher recognized her talent and gave her a collection of poetry books. “The work of Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, and Sandra Cisneros—women who wrote unapologetically about their bodies and inner lives—opened up a vast space inside me,” Sánchez writes.
Unable to find books that reflected her life, Sánchez began making up her own. “I wanted a place for myself in this tradition, and when I began seeking more texts of women writers while in college, I started to see where I fit in,” she says. Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz became her guiding lights. “It’s thanks to their rebellions, big and small, that I get to lead this extraordinary life—that is, a life completely of my choosing,” Sánchez says. “I am myself in a world that pressures me to be otherwise, a world that doesn’t love me, wasn’t built for me.”
