Title: Imaginary parents
First published: 1996
Description: In this uniquely fashioned memoir, one sister uses words, the other installations to re-create a childhood filled with adventure, tragedy, and the two most glamorous and mysterious people in their young lives: their parents. The setting is Los Angeles during and after World War Two. Hollywood is defining. Cigarettes ubiquitous. A meal is not a meal without meat or eggs. Red lips, toenails, and fingernails match red cotton blouses festooned with yellow sombreros.

Taking on the voices of her mother, father, and sister - as well as speaking for herself - Sheila Ortiz Taylor, the writerly daughter of an Anglo vaudevillian-lawyer and a Chicana movie star manque, strings together well-crafted vignettes that read like film clips. One scene leads to another, fractures into another until a rich family drama, and a remarkably clear child perspective emerge through the silences and substance.

Sandra, the elder, artistic daughter, offers 3-D collages in a simultaneous yet slightly shifted narrative of life under their father's red-tiled roof. Mirrors, tortillas, calaveras, Mexico, horses, books, boats, and guns are the curios in the Ortiz Taylor family cabinet. Readers will set to recollecting their own pocadillas after relishing this funny, touching portrait of a regular yet anything but common American family.
Subjects: American Authors, Authors, American, Childhood and youth, Family, Family relationships, Social life and customs, Families, American Women authors, Authors, biography, Fiction, short stories (single author), LITERARY CRITICISM, American, General, Manners and customs
Places: California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles (Calif.)
People: Sheila Ortiz Taylor (1939-)
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS3570.A9544 Z467 1996