First of all, I enjoyed reading this book. Mostly because I enjoyed the historical and social aspects of their lives. Since the book is written in her autobiographical manner, she put a lot of the historical scenes she encountered as a dweller in Mexico City along with the description of her own life as a poet. And these two are not definitely separated. For example, the scene of local riot police storming into the university and taking their autonomy as an educational institution was repeatedly reminded when she mentioned “the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. Even from this one scene, we can imagine how those different ideologies were surrounding them and people who resisted against them. The social upheaval in the book was one of the aspects I enjoyed. And this is not only because I am interested in those aspects, but also in her writing style. I feel like she spent really much time describing the atmosphere, people’s impressions, and the wind of those scenes, and whose expressions helped us imagine the scene more transparently. While the way she writes about the “life-threatening occasions” with a kind of excitement like when she went to the Clover Hotel to negotiate the pimp and when she saw a tank on the campus, the way she writes about her solitude or farewell in everyday lives is melancholic even though the former was more dangerous and something to be worried. I think this is because even though these things were more concerning than her everyday problems, she perceived them as something unreal which killed her boredom in her everyday life. And this is evident on page 105 in which she contrasted her everyday lives to the “adventure” she had last night and even concluded herself as she questioned about pursuing such unreality at what cost. As for her melancholic aspect of her, her relationships with Elena and Arturo over time were appeared to be written very melancholy and intuitively. Although she spells her emotion or the atmosphere surrounding her specifically when she faced such farewells, she seemed to think only about how it affected her emotion instead of thinking about how it would contribute to their careers. For instance, when Elena and her boyfriend went off for their last night after the theater (on page 57), She did not say cheerful words or something equivalent to, instead, she expressed her solitude after the goodbye. I am honestly relatable to this type of goodbye moment in which we see off each other after the fun moment and now you are just alone and they would have another fun night in their lives with their lover or friends. You would feel frustrated for yourself. How melancholic it is to feel empathetic to this as a reader.  But I enjoyed the book anyway.

Here are my questions:

-What are the effects of describing vague affairs such as the wind or the atmosphere in detail?

-How did her identity as “a mother of all poets” change over time at first and at the end of the book?