Throughout this memoir, Peralta traces her growing self-understanding as a woman attracted to both men and women. Over the next decades, the author grew up, had a family, started a dance school, got divorced, had lesbian affairs, became a therapist, and moved back and forth between Mexico and the United States. She told her 18-year-old daughter that “t is better to be a whore than a lesbian,” after she found some love notes a woman wrote to Marina. But if desire for boys was wrong, desire for a woman was worse, according to Peralta’s mother. “By now I should know that feeling pleasure in my body is wrong,” a 16-year-old Marina concluded. She was even criticized for dancing too close to a boy in a socially approved setting in an event hall. Her love for dancing and applause earned censure, too: “Only lower-class women go into show business,” her mother said. Growing up in midcentury Mexico, Peralta was told that sexual desire was dirty. Peralta, a Mexican woman now living in Southern California, surveys her romantic past and her struggle to understand herself as a bisexual in this memoir.
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