My Mother’s Funeral

My Mother's Funeral circles around the death of the author’s mother, but what also emerges is a landscape of personal loss and pain, of innocence, humor, violence and beauty. Drawing heavily upon her childhood experiences and Colombian heritage, Páramo describes the volatile bond linking mothers and daughters in a culture largely unknown to Americans. The book moves between past (Colombia in the 1940s) and present lives, and maps scenes both geographical (Bogotá, Medellín, Anchorage) as well as psychological--ultimately revealing the indomitable spirit of the women in her family. Especially from Páramo’s mother the reader learns what it means to be a Colombian woman.

“Páramo paints a portrait of two women—mother and daughter—in a volatile relationship that, in the end, is shaped by the strong bond of love between them. Set against a backdrop of Bogotá street violence and Medellin drug lords, My Mother’s Funeral is a big book in which the personal lives of the beautiful and vulnerable are set in high relief against cultural and historical forces that shape, but do not contain them.”
— Steven Harvey

“Full of hope, tenderness, and redemption, My Mother’s Funeral is a memoir of astonishing beauty; a spellbinding and devastating meditation on the ways we are transformed by love and loss, and how we may leave our home, but our home never leaves us.”
— Patricia Engel

October 2013
274 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$21
ISBN 978-1-933880-39-6
EBook ISBN 978-1-933880-54-9
Memoir