“Mother Archive is the most moving and perceptive memoir I’ve read in years. Erika Morillo’s captivating image-text memoir is an inescapable open door into Morillo’s courageous investigation of a life scarred by the betrayal of those meant to protect us, our mothers. A fascinating psychological collage of prose and images, Morillo’s unflinchingly honest exploration of her life, from a tragic childhood in the Dominican Republic to NYC to Chile and back again, is also a woman’s quest for love and security—in her adopted mother figures, in her art, and in motherhood as she tries, with heart-rending compassion, to become the mother she never had.”—Julia Fierro, author, The Gypsy Moth Summer

“A one-of-a-kind book, beautiful, startling, and heartbreaking . . . Morillo has a novelist’s profound heart and the piercing truth-seeking of a documentarian.”—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, This Is How You Lose Her

"Early in Mother Archive, Erika Morillo holds her ear to the warm breath of her dying abuelo and takes in the devastating recognition of all she’ll never know. The scene reverberates with this extraordinary memoir’s sensuousness and subtle fury, its layering of political history and family life, and its unrelenting awareness of a past that cannot be recovered, of all that’s been washed away. Morillo has created a dizzyingly complex visual and verbal world, where the brutality of history courses in the blood and curls the hair at the nape of the neck. At once a lyric confession, a body of photographic evidence, and an elegy for the irrecoverable past, Mother Archive begins with fire but is traversed by water—source of life and scene of death, symbol of distance and the substance in which images are developed. And at its center is an aching portrait of the mother, in all her uncanny similitude and impossible otherness. Morillo tells a crushing story about the hungers of migration and memory, about the scars of history, and about the undyingness of maternal desire. Readers will want to sit with her memoir's affecting lessons for a long, long time."—Christopher Rovee, author, New Critical Nostalgia