‘Grief is the end of loneliness”, Cristina Rivera Garza writes in her book, Liliana’s Invincible Summer, which this week won the Pulitzer prize for memoir. For the Mexican author and academic, publishing the book meant sharing the weight of a long-held grief with other shoulders across the world for the first time. Rivera Garza’s sister, Liliana, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in 1990 in Mexico, where 10 women are lost to femicide every day. The perpetrators are very rarely brought to justice. In Liliana’s case, corrupt police demanded a bribe her father could not afford to continue investigating, and officials immediately referred to the murdered woman as if she had brought on her own death.
For nearly 30 years, Rivera Garza could not manage to say her sister’s name; now, the name ripples across the lips of many thousands of readers, themselves now experiencing that same “end of loneliness” through the perpetual companionship of Liliana, a 20-year-old architecture student murdered in cold blood in her own apartment by a man who was never caught.
