Myths, mortality and motherhood Myths, mortality and motherhood Myths, mortality and motherhood

In her new essay collection, “Desire Lines,” author and journalist Kristen Millares Young, ’12, takes on the challenge of writing a memoir to uncover her matrilineal history while searching to recover the divine feminine throughout time. An award-winning journalist who has covered global stories for Washington Post and The Guardian, as well as business and politics for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Millares Young’s newsroom training taught her to harden her affect. But in this debut memoir, she opens herself up toward emotional freedom.

“In horror at the regression of human rights for women in my birth country … to orient myself toward liberation, I set out to excavate womanhood, the body and the sacred,” Millares Young writes in the opening pages of “Desire Lines.” The collection explores the author’s experiences while reporting and conducting research on sex workers in Cuba and traveling throughout Europe in search of images of Cybele, a Roman goddess worshipped for having given life to gods, humans and animals.

Millares Young comes from a lineage of hard-working, resilient women. Her parents divorced when she was barely 2, leaving her to be raised by her mother, Carmen, and her Cuban abuela, or grandmother. Carmen put child-rearing aside to focus on a career as a civil servant working for the Social Security Administration. When she discovered that she had breast cancer, she quietly sent her daughter away for a summer to stay with her dad, while she underwent chemotherapy and a double mastectomy. Millares Young’s father, who was an attorney, had remarried and distanced himself.

For Millares Young, it was her abuela, who wrote poetry and expressed herself through painting in between caregiving, who became the guide star for her life. But the family dynamics were deeply entangled – Abuela’s position in the household usurped Carmen’s, while her “daughter’s career was the summation of what Abuela failed to accomplish and yet had.” Millares Young’s very existence created their suffering. And because of her, she thought as a girl, neither woman could be free.

Throughout her collection, the threat of violence and harm toward women is ever present.  In an essay on vacationing in the Bahamas with her father, Millares Young is briefly held hostage by the private driver entrusted with chauffeuring her around. She escaped this dangerous situation using her intelligence and resolve. Millares Young also writes of visiting Belgium by herself after finishing her MFA in creative writing from the UW and being mistaken for a sex worker by local men who couldn’t understand why she was reading a novel while alone. The specter of her Cuban grandfather haunts this book, while the silence around deeply held family secrets imbues what Millares Young allows her readers to know about her past.

Millares Young was confronted with her mortality in her early 20s, when during a routine outpatient procedure, her surgeon unexpectedly found a tumor on her right ovary. Eradicating the cancer early gave her time to develop a career, grow a family and publish her first novel “Subduction” in 2020. A fear of living on borrowed time has pervaded her sense of purpose and created an urgency to build a body of work before it’s too late.

Throughout “Desire Lines,” Millares Young examines her own relationship to mothering and what the women in her life showed her about “what it means to keep going, to assimilate pain into the body as a condition of living, and to seek happiness despite constraints.”

Kristen Millares Young reads from “Desire Lines” at Elliott Bay Books on Oct. 9 at 7 p.m.