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From the cover of The Book of Emma Reyes.

Emma Reyes grew up in astonishing poverty in Colombia—illiterate, illegitimate, and abandoned. Remanded to a Catholic convent, where she endured a strange mix of manual labor, religious fear, and wonder, she escaped at age nineteen. This is where her memoir, , leaves off, but as an adult, she became an artist and an intellectual and befriended a host of Latin American and European notables, including Frida Kahlo, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Guiseppe Ungaretti, and Alberto Moravia. Hers is an incredible biography by any measure, but the book’s most startling element is Reyes’s clear-sighted, unsentimental remembrance of her difficult childhood. The narrative comes in the form of twenty-three epistolary sketches written by Reyes between 1969 and 1997