Breath, Eyes, Memory

Breath, Eyes, Memory is the first novel by the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, published in 1994 when she was twenty-five.

Sophie narrates, and the book follows her from the age of twelve into her twenties, through school in Brooklyn, a marriage, a return to Haiti and a period of adult reckoning with her mother and her aunt. Danticat wrote the book from her own experience of leaving Haiti as a child and moving to New York, and the novel keeps the two countries connected rather than treating one as the past: the family's history, including the violence that produced Sophie, is carried into the Brooklyn apartment and has to be dealt with there. The women in the book are given different kinds of authority — the aunt's, the mother's, the daughter's — and the novel is direct about the bodily and psychological costs that are passed down between them, which is why the middle of the story is harder than the arrival. It was chosen for Oprah's Book Club in May 1998, four years after publication, and it established Danticat as one of the writers who changed how Haitian-American fiction was read.