Skip to content
MIT Press
  • MIT Press
  • Books
    • Column
      • View all subjects
      • New releases
      • Catalogs
      • Textbooks
      • Series
      • Awards
    • Column
      • Authors
      • Distributed presses
      • The MIT Press Reader
      • Podcasts
      • Collections
    • Column
      • MIT Press Direct

        MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide.

        • Learn more
  • Journals
    • column
      • Journals all topics
      • Economics
      • International Affairs, History, & Political Science
    • column
      • Arts & Humanities
      • Science & Technology
      • Open access
    • column
      • MIT Press journals

        MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology.

        • Learn more
  • Open Access
    • column
      • Open access at the MIT Press
      • Open access books
      • Open access journals
    • column
      • Direct to Open
      • MIT Open Publishing Services
      • MIT Press Open on PubPub
    • Column
      • Open access

        The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition.

        • Learn more
  • Resources
    • column
      • Current authors
      • Prospective authors
      • Instructors
    • column
      • Media inquiries
      • Booksellers
      • Rights and permissions
    • column
      • Resources

        Collaborating with authors, instructors, booksellers, librarians, and the media is at the heart of what we do as a scholarly publisher. If you can’t find the resource you need here, visit our contact page to get in touch.

        • Learn more
  • Give
  • About
    • Column
      • About
      • Jobs
      • Internships
      • MIT Press Editorial Board
      • MIT Press Management Board
      • Our MIT story
    • Column
      • Catalogs
      • News
      • Events
      • Conferences
      • Bookstore
    • Column
      • The MIT Press

        Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.

        • Learn more
  • Contact Us
Newsletter
MIT Press
Newsletter
  • Home
  • Semiotext(e) / Native Agents
  • fiction
  • The Sad Passions
The Sad Passions

Semiotext(e) / Native Agents

The Sad Passions

by Veronica Gonzalez Peña

  • $17.95 Paperback

344 pp., 6 x 9 in, 17 b&w illus.

  • Paperback
  • 9781584351207
  • Published: May 17, 2013
  • Publisher: Semiotext(e)

$17.95

  • Penguin Random House
  • Amazon
  • Barnes and Noble
  • Bookshop.org
  • Indiebound
  • Indigo
  • Books a Million

Other Retailers:

  • Penguin Random House
  • Amazon
  • Barnes and Noble
  • Bookshop.org
  • Indiebound
  • Indigo
  • Books a Million
  • Amazon.co.uk
  • Blackwells
  • Bookshop.org
  • Foyles
  • Hive
  • Waterstones
  • Request permissions
  • Description
  • Author(s)
  • Praise

The lyrical story of a Mexican family torn apart by the fragility and madness of one of its members.

Told by six women in one family, Veronica Gonzalez Pena's The Sad Passions captures the alertness, beauty, and terror of childhood lived in proximity to madness. Set against the backdrop of a colonial past, spanning three generations, and shuttling from Mexico City to Oaxaca to the North Fork of Long Island to Veracruz, The Sad Passions is the lyrical story of a middle-class Mexican family torn apart by the undiagnosed mental illness of Claudia, a lost child of the 1960s and the mother of four little girls.

It is 1960, and the wild and impulsive sixteen-year-old Claudia elopes from her comfortable family home in Mexico City with Miguel, a seductive drifter who will remain her wandering husband for the next twenty years. Hitchhiking across the United States with Miguel, sometimes spending the night in jails, Claudia stops sleeping and begins seeing visions. Abandoned at a small clinic in Texas, she receives electroshock treatment while seven months pregnant with her first daughter. Afterward, Miguel leaves her, dumb and drooling, at her mother's doorstep.

Living more often at her mother's home than with Miguel, Claudia will give birth to four girls. But when Julia, her second daughter, is inexplicably given away to a distant relation in Los Angeles, Claudia's fragile, uncertain state comes to affect everyone around her. Julia's disappearance—which could symbolize the destabilizing effect of manic depression—will become the organizing myth in all of the daughters' unsettled lives; for if one can disappear, why not all of them?

Veronica Gonzalez Pena is the author of twin time: or, how death befell me, which won the Premio Aztlán Literary Prize in 2007. She is also the founder of rockypoint Press, which produces a series of artist-writer collaborations.

In Veronica Gonzalez-Peña's The Sad Passions, four sisters, daughters of a mad mother, devoted to her and afraid of her, tell their versions of a tortured family romance. The sisters' and mother's raw, impassioned voices are intricately interwoven, and, Rashomon-like, the novel speaks of familial love's strange demands, harsh effects, and lasting ties. Veronica Gonzalez Peña's The Sad Passions is honest and riveting.

Lynne Tillman

In Veronica Gonzalez's truthtelling novel of four bright sisters growing up with a mentally ill mother, the lucid, elegant writing defies the very havoc it describes. Built of multiple voices, with curious, haunting photographs, The Sad Passions is immersive, harrowing, and wonderfully intelligent.

Michelle Huneven, author of Blam

Five women, including a mother and her now grown daughter, Julia, who was discarded when she was young, narrate this novel of fractured family, selves, and hearts, which gently mesmerizes with its rhythmic prose, and the emotionally rich and complex strategies each woman employs in telling her story. A beautiful and moving choral tale of isolation, love, damage, and intimate struggles. Its many landscapes, especially Mexico City, sing too.

Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name: A Novel

For all of the effects of erasure and absence on The Sad Passions, the narration is incredibly present, crawling on the page in spidery, sprawling observations, setting up pools and lairs that lure a reader in.

Margaret Wappler

Los Angeles Times

The Sad Passions, Veronica Gonzalez Peña's extraordinary novel of desire, loss, and matrilineal history, explodes the teenage pregnancy script through its unflinching plumbing of the bond between mother and daughter. The Sad Passions begins with a story we think we know, and then shows us how little any of us understand: about our ancestors, our parents, ourselves.

Lisa Locascio

The Los Angeles Review of Books

An exquisite and moving panorama of late 20th century life in Mexico and the US.

George Porcari

California Literary Review

I like the way the [cover] image moves with this novel, the way the absence becomes the presence. Veronica Gonzalez Peña does not write absence as a form of lack, her absence froths and grows agitated, it fills up the page with pulsing need.

Saehee Cho

HTML Giant

Related Books

twin time
Another Love Discourse
A World of Women
The Letters of Mina Harker
Little Joy
The Superrationals
Surveys
Pacific Agony
All the King’s Horses
Aliens & Anorexia
logo
  • Column 1
    • Books
    • Journals
    • The MIT Press Reader
    • Podcasts
    • Imprints
  • Column 2
    • The MIT Press
      • About
      • Bookstore
      • Catalogs
      • Conferences
      • Press Editorial Board
      • Jobs
      • Internships
      • Press Management Board
      • News
      • Staff
      • Code of Conduct
      • Give
  • Column 3
    • Site Help
      • Accessibility
      • FAQ
      • Our eBooks
      • Privacy Policy
      • Terms of Use
  • Column 4
    • Resources
      • Current Authors
      • Prospective Authors
      • Booksellers
      • Instructors
      • Rights and Permissions
      • Media Inquiries
      • MIT Discounts
  • Column 5
    • Digital
      • CogNet
      • Digital Partners and Products
      • Knowledge Futures Group
      • MIT Press Direct
  • US

    One Broadway 12th Floor Cambridge, MA 02142

  • UK

    Unit 57710 PO Box 6945 London W1A 6US UK

  • Contact

Connect

© 2023 MIT Press. All Rights Reserved.

Powered by Supadu