Blue Box

About this book

Six years after fleeing the 1973 military coup in Chile, eleven-year-old Carmen Aguirre and her family return to join the underground resistance. At eighteen, Carmen commits herself to the movement, running a safe house on the border between Chile and Argentina. Forfeiting her first marriage to the pressures of revolutionary life, and living with the ever-present fear of capture and torture, Carmen realizes the sacrifices she who unconditionally loves the cause must make. Fifteen years later, in Los Angeles, Carmen once again unconditionally gives everything of herself -- for love of a different kind. She begins a sexually passionate but emotionally impossible relationship with a handsome Chicano TV star whom she pursues as relentlessly as she herself was once hunted. Emphasizing the tensions between these two modalities of loving, Aguirre's sexy, fast-paced, and darkly comic monologue ultimately asks: Between the extremes of love for the political cause and love for another, how and where does one create space for self-love?