Reyna Grande has spent a celebrated career writing about the distance between where a person begins and where they end up. On Monday, June 15 at 7 p.m., she brings that inquiry to Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena to discuss and sign her new book, “Migrant Heart: Essays About Things I Can’t Forget,” in conversation with Leslie Priscilla.
Grande is the author of the landmark memoirs “The Distance Between Us” and “A Dream Called Home,” works that traced her journey from a poverty-shadowed childhood in Iguala, Mexico, to a life as one of the country’s most resonant chroniclers of the immigrant experience. Her new book turns the gaze inward again, an intimate memoir-in-essays about the hidden cost of the American Dream and the slow, unfinished work of healing that follows survival.
Across the collection, Grande interrogates what it means to live between two nations, two languages and two identities, and how that division has shaped the woman, mother and writer she has become. The essays range widely — from the legacy of violence in her hometown to a bittersweet family trip through Europe spent reconciling her own impoverished past with her children’s world of abundance — circling questions about whether stories can heal the jagged edges of a difficult childhood, and whether the telling is worth the price.
Vroman’s, the venerable independent bookstore on East Colorado Boulevard, has long served as a gathering place for readers and writers in the region, and its author events regularly draw full houses.
Reyna Grande will discuss and sign “Migrant Heart: Essays About Things I Can’t Forget” on Monday, June 15 at 7 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. Admission is free. For more information, call (626) 449-5320. Registration requested.
