I'M Still Here

When Marcelo Rubens Paiva was 11 years old, his father was tortured to death by the Brazilian dictatorship. 25 years later, his mother, Eunice, helped usher into law a way for the families of the regime's victims to finally have their deaths formally acknowledged, and allow them to seek compensation. In between, the unspooling of Brazilian democracy, and then the terrors and everydayness of life under the dictatorship, are where Paiva discovers his mother, and himself. Eunice Paiva--who always preferred reading a novel to cavorting with her children, who was charming, and glamorous, and who never let anyone see her cry--responded to the shock of her widowhood by going back to law school in her 40s while raising five children alone, and then becoming a heroic advocate for Brazil's indigenous people. For her only son, his father's death catapulted him from a childhood spent playing soccer on the beach in Rio into the rest of his life, one characterized by the awe, and confusion, of a young man, still in mourning, watching his relentless, brilliant mother plunge their family ever forward.