After life

Tobias Hecht

"Bruna Verissimo, a youth from the hardscrabble streets of Recife, in Northeast Brazil, spoke with Tobias Hecht over the course of many years, reliving her early childhood in a raging and destitute home, her initiation into the world of prostitution at a time when her contemporaries had scarcely started school, and her coming of age against all odds. Hecht had originally intended to write a biography of Verissimo. But with interviews ultimately spanning a decade, he couldn't ignore that much of what he had been told wasn't, strictly speaking, true. In Verissimo's recounting of her life, a sister who had never been born died tragically, while the very same rape that shattered the body and mind of an acquaintance occurred a second time, only with a different victim and several years later. At night, with the anthropologist's tape recorder in hand, she became her own ethnographer,...

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