Praise for The Cracks We Bear

“Reflective, sensitive, and often moving, Catalina Infante’s first novel revolves around a mother-daughter relationship, its silences, distances, and cracks.” —La Tercera

 “A poignant story, full of touching moments that approach motherhood from a more human perspective. It addresses the fears, exhaustion, and disappointment of first-time mothers who feel suffocated by overwhelming social mandates. Catalina Infante constructs a vision of motherhood that is terrifying, and describes a facet of motherhood that is not portrayed in magazines, TV shows, or movies.” —Infobae

 “A literary composition somewhere between a confessional diary and a costumbrista’s work that portrays society with some sarcasm, but also with the necessary dose of tenderness and hope. The author outlines, with a beautifully feminine intimacy, the shaken Chile of the last 30 year. The novel gives voice to an uprooted Chilean daughter of political exiles, in search of her own intimate identity, in a country that was foreign to her from the very moment of her birth.” —Cine y literatura

 “A very personal, intimate book that explores longings, doubts, tiredness, and social pressures connected to motherhood, and the need to return to normality, to recover oneself, one’s own body.” —Bio Bio Chile

 “Catalina Infante writes with empathy about loneliness, grief, fears, exile, motherhood, and the relationship of mothers with feminism.” —Culturizarte

 “When her daughter Antonia is born, Laura thinks of Esther, her mother. A mother who was not especially loving, who thought the best inheritance was a good education. A mother with whom Laura had may differences, and who died from cancer when she was 18. Laura finds photos and postcards that Esther never sent; she relives vague and elusive moments in her memory, and discovers that she did not know the woman who lived in her mother.” —La Tercera

 “The Cracks We Bear is a ‘real,’ concrete, human story full of small details … a story about being a daughter, and a mother, in a society that idealizes motherhood.” —Futuro

• Set in Chile in the late 20th century, The Cracks We Bear explores first-time motherhood, generational trauma, childhood memories and grief over the loss of a mother.
• As Laura holds her newborn daughter, she’s afraid, and angry at her late mother for not being there. Setting the theme before the reader even turns to page one is the novel’s epigraph from Gabriela Mistral’s essay “Gabriela thinks about her absent mother.”
• The story weaves through Chile, France, and Cuba
• Offers social and political critique of a Chilean social group known as the red set, with its Frenchified schools and its idealization of Cuba as a tourist paradise
• The loss of meaning in Chile in the 1990s is central to the story, which demonstrates a brutal change in two generations: the political activism of a generation of parents, and their content and complacent children
• Laura describes her relationships as full of cracks, cracks in the form of class and generational differences, paternal abandonment, sexual abuse, illness, marital strife, ideological tensions, and a crack that is irreparable: her mother’s death
• For readers of Rachel Cusk’s 2003 memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, and writings about motherhood out of Latin America like Jazmina Barrera’s 2022 memoir Linea Nigra, and Guadalupe Nettle’s Stillborn
• The author, born in exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina, now owns the bookstore Librería Catalonia in Chile.