Celebrity Memoirs Bundle

Celebrity Memoirs Bundle

Limited Edition, Two Book Bundle

"Brown Enough: True Stories About Love, Violence, the Student Loan Crisis, Hollywood, Race, Familia, and Making It in America" By Christopher Rivas

and

"Once I was You: A Memoir" Edited by Maria Hinojosa

--

"Brown Enough: True Stories About Love, Violence, the Student Loan Crisis, Hollywood, Race, Familia, and Making It in America"

At a time when disinformation, hate crimes, inequality, racial injustice, and white supremacy are on the rise, Brown Enough, part memoir and part social commentary, emerges, asking readers to proudly put their bodies, their identities, into the conversations of race. Brown Enough is a roller coaster of finding one's true self while simultaneously having a racial awakening amidst the struggle to be "perfectly" Latinx, woke, and as Brown as possible to make it in today's America.

From world-renowned actor John Leguizamo: "Brown Enough is a celebration of Brownness and a manifesto about the magic, beauty, and heartbreak that comes with being Brown in America. Brownness is more than our skin color or language or where we grew up; it’s also about the common threads that connect us all. I’m excited to see Christopher’s impact continue to grow as one of the key voices of his generation.”

Its pages are full of honest explorations of love, sex, fake-it-till-you-make-it ambition, bad Spanish, color, code-switching, white-washing, scandal, Hollywood, and more. This memoir navigates these necessary and often revealing topics through fourteen chapters, each a distinct moment where Rivas explores his Brownness and how to own it.

Brown Enough opens with a moment that forever changed Christopher Rivas's life, the night Ta-Nehisi Coates shared, in an intimate gathering in downtown L.A., the Brown man's role in the race conversation.

"All I hear is black and white. As a Brown man, a Latin man, where does that leave me?" Coates took a short breath and responded, "Not in it."

Like a reprimanded child, Rivas took his seat and remained silent for much of the event. But the effects didn't end there. This conversation pushed Rivas to contemplate and rethink how whiteness and Blackness had impacted his sense of self and worth.

"Why is Brown not in it?" became the unspoken question for the rest of his life and a thread moving through this collection. Eventually, in every conversation, during every date, at every job, Rivas began to ask, "What are the consequences of not being in the conversation?" "What does it take to be in it?"

Brown Enough is the quest to find an answer.

"Brown Enough is a must-read for anyone who wants a more expansive and inclusive view of race in America. Rivas fiercely asks us to consider tough questions and offers candid and provocative answers. He lays bare his soul on the pages." — Julissa Arce, author of You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

Christopher Rivas is an actor, author, podcaster, and storyteller best known for his on-screen work on the Fox series, CALL ME KAT. In addition, he hosts two podcasts on SiriusXM's Stitcher: Rubirosa, a limited series about the life of Porfirio Rubirosa, and a weekly show, Brown Enough. He is a Ph.D. Candidate in Expressive Arts for Global Health & Peace Building from The European Graduate School and a Rothschild Social Impact fellow. Rivas resides in Los Angeles, CA.

"Once I was You: A Memoir"

Maria Hinojosa is an award-winning journalist who, for nearly thirty years, has reported on stories and communities in America that often go ignored by the mainstream media—from tales of hope in the South Bronx to the unseen victims of the War on Terror and the first detention camps in the US. Bestselling author Julia Álvarez has called her “one of the most important, respected, and beloved cultural leaders in the Latinx community.”

In Once I Was You, Maria shares her intimate experience growing up Mexican American on the South Side of Chicago. She offers a personal and illuminating account of how the rhetoric around immigration has not only long informed American attitudes toward outsiders, but also sanctioned willful negligence and profiteering at the expense of our country’s most vulnerable populations—charging us with the broken system we have today.

An urgent call to fellow Americans to open their eyes to the immigration crisis and understand that it affects us all, this honest and heartrending memoir paints a vivid portrait of how we got here and what it means to be a survivor, a feminist, a citizen, and a journalist who owns her voice while striving for the truth.