THE EVERYTHING I HAVE LOST

Julia's best friend is her diary. She calls it "My Everything" - twelve-years-old at its beginning and fifteen at the end; a girl at the beginning, a young woman at its end, knowing more than she ever wanted to know. Julia tells her diary everything about growing up in Juárez, Mexico, on the border with Texas. At first, her family loses their house and their car, then suddenly her father is making lots of money. Her father's gone a lot, and her mother is always distracted and worried, busy creating art and wondering where her husband is.

Life in Julia´s urban neighborhood is strange too: there are shootings in the middle of the street, cars and neighbors disappear, pet cats and entire homes are left behind. Girls are disappearing somewhere in the city. She hears people saying that drug cartels rule the streets, but who are they? She only knows that she and her brother can't play outside. In the midst of this confusion and uncertainty she is becoming a young woman. She wants to move across the river to the United States where her aunt and cousins live. Julia writes about all this and about things she overhears, things she doesn't quite understand, and things she simply tries not to think about. Then her father vanishes and Julia and her brother go to live with her aunt in El Paso, Texas, across the border. What's happened to her father? Will he come back? Nobody wants to answer. And Julia can only make lists of those things she loses.

Powerful and beautifully written in an authentic and sensitive voice, The Everything I Have Lost brings us a first-hand sense of what it means to be a child living in the shadow of violence and uncertainty.

Sylvia Zéleny is a bilingual author from Sonora, Mexico. She has published several short story-collections and novels in her native Mexico. She has an MA in Historiography from ITESM, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso, where she is currently a Visiting Writer.