Erica Sanchez rose to national prominence with her New York Times best-selling young adult novel,

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.

Now, in her new memoir,

crying in the bathroom,

Erica is picking up where her last work left off,

sharing what happens when a rebellious,

brilliant young Latina wants more for her life than anyone else can imagine

actually begins to live.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you.

I so loved crying in the bathroom. I have cried myself in the bathroom too many times to count.

And I always feel like when you're writing a memoir, one of the biggest challenges is where to start

because you don't want to start with the obvious, which is like, I was born and I grew up here.

And you start with the year your vagina broke is the title of the chapter. Why the choice to start there?

Yeah, well, as a youngster, I've always really delighted in, like, scandalizing people.

Sometimes I talk to my best friend from growing up and we discuss how like we just really enjoy making people uncomfortable

and it would make us laugh. And so I think that is part of it. Also growing up, I felt an immense

sort of shame about my body. I felt like I was dirty. I had to hide my my breasts because men would look at me and I would be inviting their stairs.

I felt so just discombobulated in myself physically.

And I felt that part of the story is a continuation from the novel in a sense in which

this young woman, me, is in college trying to find herself, trying to make sense of the world

and seek pleasure and romance and love.

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