Only Child

Did you always want to belong to something and yet still feel the need to run away? 

Irasema grows up in and around Party Fan, the children’s entertainment center her mother turns into the operational heart of her life. An only child—watched, photographed, recorded—Irasema learns early on that growing up also means being archived. 

Through partial memories, objects, recordings, and scenes from childhood, the novel reconstructs a mother-daughter relationship shaped by love and the anticipation of loss. The mother builds a living archive to protect her daughter from abandonment and death; the daughter learns to survive between the crowd and solitude, between the desire to belong and the need to escape. 

A novel about memory that portrays childhood as a time of care and suffocation, and the not always logical forms of love.