Author(s): Carmen Aguirre

Biography & Memoir

A stunning follow-up to Carmen Aguirre's bestselling first memoir, Something Fierce. A powerful, heartfelt, and grippingly honest memoir of finding meaning in life and developing the strength to confront a childhood trauma.

Carmen Aguirre has lived many lives, all of them to the fullest. At age six she was a Chilean refugee adjusting to life as a Latina in North America. At eighteen she was a revolutionary dissident. In her early twenties she fought to find her voice as an actor and to break away from the stereotypical roles thrust upon her--Housekeeper, Hotel Maid, Mexican Hooker #1. Aguirre became a writer, a director, an actor, and then a mother, but alongside her many multi-faceted identities was another that was unbearable to embrace yet impossible to escape: that of the thirteen-year-old girl attacked by one of Canada's most feared rapists. Thirty-three years after the assault, Aguirre decided it was time to meet the man who changed her life.
Fierce, funny, and enlightening, Aguirre interweaves her account of overcoming the attack that shook her world with a host of stories of life and love. From the end of the Chilean revolutionary dream to life among the Chicano theatre scene of Los Angeles; from the child who was made the victim of a terrible crime to the artist who found the courage to confront her assailant, Aguirre tells a story of strength and survival that will leave you speechless.