Colombian painter Emma Reyes spent decades writing letters to a friend recounting the childhood she'd never otherwise spoken of: an illegitimate birth, a mother's abandonment, and years of poverty before a convent took her in. Unsentimental and vividly specific, her twenty-three letters trace a resourceful girl's survival—long before she became the artist admired by Sartre and Frida Kahlo.
A child growing up with nothing can still notice beauty and credit even cruel people with real gifts. A strict, tyrannical caretaker is also acknowledged as an extraordinary dressmaker, and a new home is remembered for its white pebbles and fruit trees. Generosity of attention, not self-pity, becomes a way of enduring.
A child who leads a normal life might struggle to recall the details of early years, but a life of upheaval and hardship etches small moments vividly. Things like emptying a chipped enamel bedpan on a garbage heap every morning stay precise decades later.
Children raised by adults and religious institutions little concerned with their welfare can be shaped and damaged by the combination of strict doctrine and neglect. Locked away without schooling or contact with the outside world, a girl can reach nineteen unable to read until fifteen and cut off from ordinary life.