Best Selling Books by Carmen Aguirre

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER (The Globe and Mail) A Globe and Mail Best Book [2011] A Quill & Quire Book of the Year [2011] A National Post Best Book [2011] A BBC Radio Book of the Week [October 2011] One of the CBC’s 15 Memoirs by Canadian Women Worth Reading [2015] Six-year-old Carmen Aguirre fled to Canada with her family following General Augusto Pinochet''s violent 1973 coup in Chile. Five years later, when her mother and stepfather returned to South America as Chilean resistance members, Carmen and her sister went with them, quickly assuming double lives of their own. At 18, Carmen became a militant herself, plunging further into a world of terror, paranoia and euphoria. Something Fierce takes the reader inside war-ridden Peru, dictator-ruled Bolivia, post-Malvinas Argentina and Pinochet''s Chile in the eventful decade between 1979 and 1989. Dramatic, suspenseful and darkly comic, it is a rare first-hand account of revolutionary life and a passionate argument against forgetting.

A stunning follow-up to Carmen Aguirre''s bestselling first memoir, Something Fierce. A powerful, heartfelt, and grippingly honest memoir of finding meaning in life and developing the strength to confront a childhood trauma. Carmen Aguirre has lived many lives, all of them to the fullest. At age six she was a Chilean refugee adjusting to life as a Latina in North America. At eighteen she was a revolutionary dissident. In her early twenties she fought to find her voice as an actor and to break away from the stereotypical roles thrust upon her--Housekeeper, Hotel Maid, Mexican Hooker #1. Aguirre became a writer, a director, an actor, and then a mother, but alongside her many multi-faceted identities was another that was unbearable to embrace yet impossible to escape: that of the thirteen-year-old girl attacked by one of Canada''s most feared rapists. Thirty-three years after the assault, Aguirre decided it was time to meet the man who changed her life. Fierce, funny, and enlightening, Aguirre interweaves her account of overcoming the attack that shook her world with a host of stories of life and love. From the end of the Chilean revolutionary dream to life among the Chicano theatre scene of Los Angeles; from the child who was made the victim of a terrible crime to the artist who found the courage to confront her assailant, Aguirre tells a story of strength and survival that will leave you speechless.

"Based on her own experience as a rape victim, Carmen Aguirre''s play The Trigger is a testament to the resilience and triumph of the human spirit and its ability to transcend even the most horrible and terrifying of circumstances."--BOOK JACKET.

Dark comedy about Chilean refugees who arrive in Vancouver in 1974 after Pinochet''s coup. Cast of 12 men and women.

A magic realism-inflected play that follows a family on a journey back toward Chile from Canada, and offers an external representation of the inner turmoil of exile.

Interweaving recollections of her revolutionary life in Chile under Augusto Pinochet''s regime with her fleeting attempts to realize a "vision" of love in Los Angeles, Carmen Aguirre''s one-woman show Blue Box is a fiery proclamation of carnal yearning and social conviction. As ever, Aguirre is assertive, sexy, and wryly political, sharing the sacrifices of her life with humor and courage. Carmen Aguirre is a Vancouver-based theater artist and screen actor who has worked extensively throughout North and South America. She organizes Theatre of the Oppressed workshops and teaches in the acting department at the Vancouver Film School. Her 2011 autobiography, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, is an award-winning bestseller.

The culture shock of a Latino refugee confronted by the North American school in Carmen Aguirre''s Chile Con Carne; a young man''s brutal experience of homophobia when he is "outed" by classmates in Edward Roy''s The Other Side of the Closet; the vicious gang violence waiting in the girls'' washroom in Beth Goobie''s The Face is the Place. These plays provide an unflinching look into the parallel universe of teenagers, where making the grade has very little to do with the rigors of the classroom.

Come Good Rain by George Seremba tells the riveting account of his escape from Uganda after being shot by an execution squad. In Ann Lambert''s Parallel Lines, Ramon, an El Salvadoran refugee, finds himself the scapegoat for the frustrations and failures of the staff in a declining upscale New York restaurant. And in ?Que Pasa with La Raza? by Carmen Aguirre in collaboration with The Latino Theatre Group, a young woman adjusting to a new life in North America must decide how to confront the man she recognizes from her childhood in Guatemala.