Ralph Roldan
Latina Women: AFPRL 29017
Professor Melissa Maldonado
April 23, 2010
Impossible Motherhood: A Book Review
As you might have wondered “Who is Irene Vilar?” well she is the author and the protagonist of the book, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict. Irene Vilar was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. She is a literary agent and a series editor of The Americas at Texas Tech University Press, and lives in Colorado with her husband and her two daughters. Although, Irene’s life sounds pretty normal and well accomplished, her life is kind of like a broken glass glued together. To put it bluntly, Irene Vilar had fifteen abortions in seventeen years, which is the book’s opening liner that fails to tell the whole story of this beautiful and brave book.
Looking at the cover of the book it is easy to assume that Impossible Motherhood is a sensationalist book. The “abortion addict” subtitle sounds like a strange marketing ploy, but Vilar shows that she was an abortion addict, similar to how her brothers were heroin addicts and her father an alcoholic philanderer. Besides all of the flaws in her family and herself, her grandmother was a political activist who tried to overthrow the Puerto Rican government and served jail time for this. Impossible Motherhood is the story about Irene’s journey through from the loss of her mother to suicide at the tender age of eight years old until to her sexual relationship with her fifty-one year old college professor when she was just seventeen that lasted for eleven years.
Impossible Motherhood is a memoir less about abortions than it is the story of young woman who never got enough love. It’s about a destructive family legacy, self-mutilation, and, eventually, survival. Surprisingly, reads easily and is a gripping book. Throughout the book I kept pausing hoping that she would stop and save herself from her addictions. Yes I said “addictions” and not addiction. Vilar was not just addicted to having...