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Not for Everyday Use

A Memoir

by Elizabeth Nunez

Narrator Elizabeth Nunez

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Length 7 hours 33 minutes

Language English

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Summary
About the author
About the narrator

Tracing the four days from the moment she gets the call that every immigrant fears to the burial of her mother, Elizabeth Nunez tells the haunting story of her lifelong struggle to cope with the consequences of the 'sterner stuff' of her parents' ambitions for their children and her mother's seemingly unbreakable conviction that displays of affection are not for everyday use. But Nunez sympathizes with her parents, whose happiness is constrained by the oppressive strictures of colonialism, by the Catholic Church's prohibition of artificial birth control (which her mother obeys, terrified by the threat of eternal damnation), and by what Malcolm Gladwell refers to as the 'privilege of skin color' in his mother's Caribbean island homeland where 'the brown-skinned classes...came to fetishize their lightness.'

Biography & Memoir Nonfiction

Elizabeth Nunez is the award-winning author of eight novels. Both Boundaries and Anna In-Between were New York Times Editors' Choices and Anna In-Between won the 2010 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and the 2011 Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers and Barnes & Noble. Nunez also received a NALIS Lifetime Literary Award from the Trinidad & Tobago National Library. She is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, CUNY, where she teaches fiction writing.