BOOK

The Body Papers

REVIEWS

“

“Talusan chronicles that fraught passage from one world, one body, to another, marking with sensitivity how an American life can be both burden and benediction.”

LUIS FRANCIA, NEW YORK TIMES

“

“Such commentary, while righteous and earned, is not the point of this indelible book. Talusan has the instincts of a storyteller, teasing out her narrative through images and allusion.”

JENNIFER SZALAI, NEW YORK TIMES

“

Grace Talusan’s finely-wrought and eloquent memoir, “The Body Papers,” out April 9, was the winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. The book is visceral, bodily, and throbs with pain and trauma — sexual abuse by a family member, cancer, the phantom-limb ache of an outsider in a foreign land, and later, as an outsider in the homeland.

NINA MACLAUGHLIN, THE BOSTON GLOBE

BIO

Grace Talusan's memoir, The Body Papers, won the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction, the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, and was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection. Her short story, "The Book of Life and Death," was the Boston Book Festival's 2020 One City One Story pick and she published dispatches from the pandemic in the anthologies, And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again and Alone Together, which raise funds for the Book Industry Charitable Foundation.

She was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. She graduated from Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine. She is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She taught writing for many years at Tufts University and Grub Street, and is currently the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. 

Spring 2021 Events