Peninsula Writer Pens Memoir On Childhood, Healing And Identity

BELMONT, CA — Writing can be therapeutic, a means to healing and processing trauma. For Peninsula writer Emilly Prado, the essays she wrote about growing up as a Chicana in Belmont helped her grapple with experiences involving identity, mental health, generational trauma and what justice looks like as a survivor of sexual assault.

The essays turned into a memoir, titled "Funeral for Flaca," which comes out on July 1 and is being published through Future Tense Press. The title is a play on Prado trying to find her identity — "Flaca" means "skinny" in Spanish.

Prado, who is now living in Portland, doesn’t shy away from describing the more intimate events of her life, from experiencing casual racism at school as a child to surviving a sexual assault.

Growing up in the “hella white” suburb of Belmont in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Prado describes in the book how no one seemed to know her or her sister besides their own family. The number of Brown kids could be counted on one hand and the number of Black students with two or fewer fingers, Prado writes.

“The point was I am too different — my skin is too dark — and I will never be liked by someone who isn’t dark like me too,” Prado writes in the book. “So, I think this all means I am doomed. No one will ever like me back — at least not in vanilla white Belmont, California.”

Beyond dealing with issues of race in Belmont — which today is 62 percent white, according to the U.S. Census — Prado walks the reader chronologically through her life in 19 essays. Prado places the reader in her shoes as she recounts specific moments of trauma in detail, yet does so in conversational, at times lighthearted prose. What emerges is the idea that “healing is not linear,” Prado said in an interview with Patch last week.

“Even through some of the unfortunate things that I've had to experience, I'm still writing about it and I'm still taking up space in a way that feels good to me,” Prado said.

Prado said that while it is “kind of uncomfortable” to describe personal details so publicly, she has always been drawn to memoir and hopes that readers can relate to her experiences.

“I hope that ultimately other folks who are struggling, whether they experienced those things or adjacent struggles, can find something that helps them feel less lonely or makes them laugh on occasion,” Prado said. “That balance is something that’s hard to strike in life in general: ‘How do you be light even when you’ve experienced a lot of darkness?’”

Much of the real work in the book came from therapy, according to Prado. She’s been distanced from the events described in the book, which helped her to write about them in detail.

Prado said working through drafts was hard because in an immersive writing state, her body felt it was back in those memories, especially those of her childhood.

“Anytime that I’m describing what it feels like to cry, I’m really, really trying to remember and put myself there so it can really stir up a lot emotionally,” Prado said. “It takes a lot of time and just energy and space, but I think when you’re writing and editing the book, you’re asking every sentence: ‘What is this sentence trying to say and what is the deeper meaning?’. And with that you also have a lot of reflection.”

In the memoir's final essay, Prado makes it apparent that she is still working toward healing and understanding what she's been through in life so far.

“It’s clear that it’s not a closed book, that, ‘Okay, I healed and I'm done,'” Prado said. “It’s an ongoing process. Growing up is hard.”

Click here for more information and to pre-order "Funeral for Flaca."