
She describes the three plaster Graces in her mother’s Chicago kitchen, the stained glass she gazed upon during Mass while in boarding school and myriad pieces created and collected by the community of artists with whom she surrounds herself today. Several articles are devoted to specific paintings, sculptures and exhibits.

The writer also explores poverty and wealth, often through the lens of art. In 1987 she couldn’t imagine being anything other than a writer today, however, she provides an asterisk and divulges that she’d rather be a comedian, a shoe designer, a milliner, a henna hand painter. And when we read older articles that tell of thoughts the author no longer thinks, Cisneros grants new insights. Through her inclusion of book introductions she wrote for other authors, we get rich glimpses into her relationships with fellow writers, sitting with them at tables as they sip beers and share life. In a written response to a mother’s request that schools ban from their libraries the author’s “The House on Mango Street,” Cisneros talks of words as medicine and libraries as medicine cabinets.

In her compilation of essays, speeches, letters and notes, Sandra Cisneros takes readers behind the typewriters she has written upon over the decades, revealing the rooms in which her novels and poems were composed and the thoughts circling her mind as she created the characters so many have adored, and introducing the people she loved and lost along the way in “A House of My Own.” Book review: “A House of My Own,” by Sandra Cisneros – The Denver Post
