A Body Across Two Hemispheres: A Memoir in Essays

Translator Buitron chronicles her years living in the United States and Ecuador in her beguiling if shaky debut, an essay collection that charts her struggle to feel like she belonged, and raises perceptive questions around home and identity along the way. Born in Milagro in 1989, Buitron moved as a child to Norwalk, Conn., where her family spent the next decade before being summoned back to Ecuador to care for her ailing grandfather. Moving fluidly between the past and present, she writes of returning to the U.S. at age 22 and gaining 10 pounds (“My stomach is indeed an insipid gringa,” she concedes), while an essay titled “(Un)Documented” charts her husband’s frustrating experiences navigating DACA. Meanwhile, “The Garbage Collector’s Daughter” recounts the treasures she found in the trash procured from her father’s routes through Connecticut’s wealthiest towns. While her vulnerability and verve are enticing, Buitron’s writing has a tendency to get in the way of itself—as when she devotes an entire essay to her eye problems or turns to florid descriptions to describe the mundane (“The process of protein, follicle, and root thrives on the landscape of my epidermis,” she writes of her body hair). Despite its rough patches, it makes for a layered look at a life stretched across cultures. (Mar.)