Not for Everyday Use, Elizabeth Nunez
Not for Everyday Use, Elizabeth Nunez
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Not for Everyday Use
A Memoir

Author: Elizabeth Nunez

Narrator: Elizabeth Nunez

Unabridged: 7 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/15/2014

Synopsis

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.'

About Elizabeth Nunez

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by David

Rating: 3.5 stars Not for Everyday Use lives up to much of the high standard established in Nunez’ previous literary outing, Boundaries, a novel which brilliantly examines the plight of a Caribbean immigrant navigating the complex terrain of life in America. Switching gears from fiction to reality, h......more

Goodreads review by Camille Alexander

Not Just a Memoir What Elizabeth Nunez has managed to do, again, is wrench emotions from me that I thought were long buried. I wept openly went she writes of singing "Be Not Afraid" as the gravediggers worked on her mother's grave. I went back to Layperouse watching both my grandparents' graves being......more

Goodreads review by Micki

I received Ms. Nunez's book as a First Read. Her families story is interesting and she gives insight into how class and race was and is perceived. Many times she repeats explanations and back story which detracts from the main story. She mentions her other novels many times which could persuade the......more

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