Media Notes
A memoir by 97-year-old Las Cruces author Mireille Marokvia, Sins of the Innocent (Unbridled Books, $24.95), which you read about here last month, has earned a rave review by The New York Times. The Sept. 6 review by Times critic William Grimes is a rave: "The images are vivid, the lives truly extraordinary."
En route to the nation's leading books pages, Marokvia's story survived several derailments, by forces of nature and politics, love and the ravages of time. In 1942, she was a young French woman living with her German husband in Hitler's Germany. Marokvia began her book as a collection of sketches from her life, written in both French and German. She burned that draft as the Gestapo knocked at her door.
Twenty-five years later, she was living with her husband in Mexico and began her memoir again. When her writing caused unbearable discord with her aging husband, she burned that draft, too, in their "splendid fireplace." She did not write another line for 13 years.
A few years after her husband's death, Marokvia went to her writing desk again. Her first book of memoirs, Immortelles: Memoir of a Will-o'-the-Wisp, was published in 1996 to good reviews.
In 1997, the author had a small stroke, then a more serious one, leaving her unable to sign her own name. But there was another story she needed to tell, and she struggled to relearn to write.
She broke her hip and once again recovered. Then her eyesight failed and she spent several months persuading her doctor to perform cataract surgery. Another hurdle beaten, she again took up her pages and finished Sins in 2004.
The Times says of Marokvia's story that she "captures it movingly in her precise, beautifully written memoir, a strange tale of two bohemians caught up in a totalitarian nightmare."
Marokvia currently is at work on her third book of memoirs. Given her determination and tenacity, one can only imagine she will finish it in time to celebrate her 100th birthday.
—Donna Clayton Lawder
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