Anxious Attachments

Winner of the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and Longlisted for PEN America’s Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, Anxious Attachments takes us through the life stages of a woman living in the American Southwest from the 1970s to the present.

In a series of intimate essays, Alvarado moves from adolescence into adulthood while grappling with attachments that develop through her family and her ties to the wider world around her while she works as a teacher, writer, and caregiver. Though written from a single woman’s perspective, these essays invite us to reflect on the many roles women play and the social factors that touch upon them. Alvarado’s essays portray a broad world of experience, reflecting on class, race, and poverty in America with emotional depth and sensitivity.