August Second

This is a story of a Mexican-American family who lived in the same fertile valley that was the setting for John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Several decades after Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, this family realized the American dream of creating a financially successful business, sending their children to private school, and owning their family home. They also experienced a father’s alcoholism; a brother’s Down syndrome; a twin brother’s HIV infection, homosexuality, and death; a daughter’s struggles with rivalry, addictions, and personal demons; and, a mother’s decline into dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The author tells this story with courageous honesty. The tale is not elaborately reconstructed by the author to portray how she wanted things to be to engender approval from readers or surviving relatives, nor to enhance her image or that of family members. Instead, it is a heart-wrenching account of denial, anger, guilt, death, and acceptance of realities about herself and her family.