Island Of Bones: Essays American Lives

This excerpt from "Island of Bones: Essays American Lives" by Joy Castro discusses the author's experiences as a Cuban American woman and her search for identity. Castro discusses the difficulties of not belonging to a specific community and the search for a unique identity.

What is identity when youre a girl adopted as an infant by a Cuban American family of Jehovahs Witnesses? The answer isnt easy. You wont find it in books. And you certainly wont find it in the neighborhood. This is just the beginning of Joy Castros unmoored life of searching and striving that shes turned to account with literary alchemy in Island of Bones.In personal essays that plumb the depths of not-belonging, Castro takes the all-too-raw materials of her adolescence and young adulthood and views them through the prism of time. The result is an exquisitely rendered, richly detailed perspective on a uniquely troubled young life that reflects on the larger questions each of us faces in a world where diversity and singularity are forever at odds. In the experiences of her pasthunger and abuse, flight as a fourteen-year-old runaway, single motherhood, the revelations of her true ethnic identity, the suicide of her fatherCastro finds the jagged, smashed place of edges and fragments that she pieces together to create an island all her own. Hers is a complicated but very real depiction of what it is to jump class, to not belong but to find ones voice in the interstices of identity.