“I was not the first one to leave the island,” Patricia Coral, CAS/MFA ’22, writes of moving from Puerto Rico to Houston in 2014, “but I’m the only one that hasn’t returned.” 

In her memoir, Women Surrounded by Water, longlisted for a 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award, Coral reflects on Hurricane Maria and the lives splintered in its wake. As she puts it, “You’re not here; you’re not there.” 

The memoir hangs together loosely. Details are revealed in glimmers, like light filtered through the trees. Coral’s ex-husband, we learn, hid syringes in the toilet tank, in his shoes; when he leaves, Coral retreats to the shower, where she remains until her fingers are wrinkled. Alternating between English and Spanish, the text reads like a frenzied character study, two poles “pushing against each other.” 

Guilt is never far behind. When the storm hits, Coral is in Houston, frantically dialing her mother. “They’re together,” she realizes. “I am the one who is alone.” She isn’t there to see the wreckage: her grandmother’s couch stained brown, her porcelain figurines “beheaded on the floor.”

But Coral doesn’t wallow in self-pity. Drawing from the writers who stirred her, from Sandra Cisneros to Maya Angelou, she resolves to tell her own story, one revelatory and lucid, rooted in all she needed to write. That is how one finds their way, Coral contends, how they “honor the truth.” What emerges is a woman self-possessed, charting her own course. “We don’t think of ourselves as victims,” she says—to live in two places at once, she asserts, is a kind of strength. 

Coral left Puerto Rico over a decade ago, but it has never left her. Throughout the book, she evokes her grandmother, aunts, and mother. At one point, she promises to remember them, to make of their story something beautiful, to chronicle “the lives that were not and the ones that could’ve been.”