Veronica Gonzalez Peña’s “Secret Daughter”

Thursday, October 22
Doors: 7:30pm
Reading: 8pm
at 2220 Arts+Archives

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Veronica Gonzalez Peña's Secret Daughter Book Launch
and Conversation with Chris Kraus

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Exiled from her large extended family in Mexico City, the narrator of Secret Daughter was sent to the United States to live with an uncle’s family when she was six. Her family had hoped to protect the child from her mother’s acute mental illness. Slowly, she adapts to life in a small college town in the Midwest with her loving but weak uncle and his callous wife, but long summer trips back to her extended family in Mexico lead the girl to rightly believe that she is living two separate lives in two separate worlds. Adding to her disorientation is the fact that her adopted parents, when she is twelve, unceremoniously reveal to her that her birth father is, in fact, her presumed father’s best friend. 

Years later the narrator begins psychoanalysis to try to understand her perpetual state of displacement and what she has lost. As her analysis and her work on this book progress, she—and the reader—become fully immersed in the pain and confusion of self-revelation. Her seductively lyrical, sharp, and rigorous observations bring the world and mindscape of childhood thrillingly close, while that fractured childhood’s relation to the disruptions of her adulthood becomes achingly clear. 

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Fueled by a sharp intelligence and analytical rigor, this captivating novel pieces together the fragmented archive of a life, its startling revelations even more poignant and profound against the backdrop of Mexico’s own charged history.”
—Chloe Aridjis, author of The Shadow of the Object

“This is a riveting novel about secrets and whispers, lies and half-told truths. Our heroine has three fathers and yet no father at all; she comes from a large family but lives in strange solitude; she is a citizen of two countries yet is caught in between both. More than anything else, though, Secret Daughter is a story beautifully told, a young girl’s journey toward freedom and self-knowledge, a writer’s quest for self-completion.”
—Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn

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Veronica Gonzalez Peña is a writer and filmmaker. She is author of twin time: or how death befell me, and The Sad Passions; her films include Lawrence Weiner: Writing on the Wall and Pat Steir: Artist. Secret Daughter is her third novel with Semiotext(e).

Chris Kraus’ most recent novel is The Four Spent the Day Together.  She is presently  Visiting Faculty at Deep Springs College, and is a co-editor of Semiotexte, alongside Hedi El Kholti.