Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn't My Rapist by Cecilia Gentili (E-book)

As heard on NPR’s Latino USA

With advance praise from:

JANET MOCK, AUTHOR OF REDEFINING REALNESS:

“A painstaking, personal and power-filled manifesto for survivors and trans women and anyone dreaming and yearning on the margins. Faltas is as intentional, resilient, original and acerbic as its activist author.”

EDMUND WHITE, AUTHOR OF A BOY’S OWN STORY:

“Cecilia Gentili is a brilliant writer whose Faltas (which is Spanish for “errors”) are infallible reports from the front lines of trans literature. She has so much courage and grit and is outrageously daring. The villains and saints in her childhood and adolescence she evokes with truth and humour. This book is irresistible.”

TORREY PETERS, AUTHOR OF DETRANSITION, BABY:

“These are bewitching accounts that do everything all at once: accuse, forgive, mock, heal, teach, seduce; stories that transcend classification and reality even as they tell hard truths. Cecilia Gentili is a singular voice that you can’t miss.”

MORGAN M PAGE, WRITER, FRAMING AGNES:

“Cecilia Gentili is a born storyteller — her voice jumps from every page. Her humour and warmth disarm you before sudden turns into the shocking and accusatory. Faltas pulsates with the same thrill as listening in secretly to a phone call, opening someone else's mail, reading a strangers' diary. You know it's wrong but you would do anything to keep going.”

In these hilarious and heartbreaking letters, Cecilia Gentili reinvents the trans memoir, putting the confession squarely between the writer and her enemies, paramours and friends.

Writing to childhood figures such as her rapist’s daughter, her father’s mistress, her best friend, and her mother, Gentili probes deeply into the bitter cruelty, buried secrets, and delicious gossip of a small town.

Is she here for revenge, or forgiveness? Both! And more! A story of sex, theft, murder, motherhood, and outrageous fashion choices, Faltas is a beautiful, messy meditation on what it takes to heal, and even grow.

ABOUT CECILIA GENTILI

Originally from Argentina, Cecilia Gentili came to the USA pursuing a safer life as a transgender woman. She lived undocumented for 10 years, hustling doing sex work which came with drug use. After surviving arrests and an immigration detention, she accessed recovery services and won asylum. She subsequently served as Director of Policy at Gay Men’s Health Crisis and founded Transgender Equity Consulting, which works to ensure all people living on the margins receive dignity and respect. A storyteller and actress, Cecilia has appeared in FX's Pose and her own one-woman show. Faltas is her first book.

MORE PRAISE FOR FALTAS

“I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything so emotionally honest and morally rigorous. She manages radical empathy without compromising her own emotional integrity … It’s funny and clear and vivid and painful and also so complex … We need this book, I kept thinking as I read. Fuck all the college reading lists for Ethics 101. Just assign Faltas. It’s funnier than Kant, and more realistic.”
—them

“Uses humor and vivid storytelling to talk not only about abuse and trauma, but also joy and survival.”

—NPR

“Strikes a rare balance: at once agonizing and hilarious, angry and forgiving, beautiful and unbearable. In other words, it is an almost perfect reflection of the fullness of a life marked by triumph…All too often, memoirs from writers like Gentili are derisively treated as a kind of trauma dump, a place where the (sometimes exploitative) focus is on just laying down the awful events of the narrator’s life, and the craft of the memoir is understood to be secondary. But Gentili’s work offers an important rebuttal to such expectations. Faltas is a beautifully crafted narrative about difficult experiences, not an unprocessed litany of violence or tragedy porn…I was reminded not so much of the other queer memoirs I’ve read, but of Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century nobleman and philosopher at the heart of the French Renaissance.”
—Hugh Ryan, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Blunt, no-punch-pulling … the epistolary memoir is composed of eight letters, each addressed to a different person who radically shaped Gentili’s earliest years through their cruelty, neglect, friendship, conditional affection, and, in the case of her late grandmother, unconditional love … Gentili is able to reframe those experiences — as well as her formative clashes with colorism and transphobia — as communal projects rather than isolated incidents, the burden from which only she would otherwise bear.”
—Vulture

“[A] breathtaking addition to the canon of works about “messy trans lives.” … one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read.“
—Autostraddle

“Raw, incandescent … groundbreaking … powerfully and necessary … Faltas is not a redemptive book or a story of victoriously emerging from a traumatic past, but that’s not its aim. It is [written] by a woman determined to tell the truth and resolve unfinished business.”
—Chicago Review of Books

”In some ways I may never finish processing this book. Gentili's writing is so raw without ever feeling unpolished, so personal and honest and unflinching. Alongside Dream Rooms and A Year Without a Name: A Memoir, it is a trans memoir that apologizes for nothing and refuses to make compromises for cisgender readers. Gentili's treatment of the trauma central to "Faltas" is unparalleled; nothing feels sensationalized but nothing is shied away from. A phenomenal, important book.”

—Gus Thompson, The Ivy Bookshop (Baltimore, MD)

“A little earthquake of a book … powerfully glides through abuse, sex work, forgiveness, friendship and class mobility … with a storied career and life, characteristic humour and an eye for a witty barb, Gentili has crafted a warm, thoughtful, piercing book.”
—Xtra

“A fresh take on a stale genre … [Faltas is] packed with life … a remarkable book.”
—Lambda Literary Review

“A revelation … emotionally and ethically complex … a story of learning to work with what little power one has … an outstanding quality of Faltas is that it avoids melodrama and moralizing. What it depicts is not a fallen world but the ordinary state of things.”
—McKenzie Wark, Liber

“A uniquely intimate and powerful story of reclaiming and rebuilding from childhood trauma. This will be a tough read for many people, but Gentili rewards readers with a perspective on becoming your true self that is valuable for any identity.”
—Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA)