First published 2013
Sonia Sotomayor opens her memoir by examining the forces that shaped her unlikely rise to the Supreme Court. She details growing up in Bronx housing projects with an alcoholic father who died when she was nine and a mother struggling to hold the family together. Her paternal grandmother provided refuge from the chaos at home. At age seven, doctors diagnosed Sotomayor with juvenile diabetes, forcing her to learn self-reliance by administering her own insulin injections. With only television lawyers as role models, she set her sights on a legal career despite having little understanding of what it required. Sotomayor chronicles her academic achievements from high school valedictorian through Princeton and Yale Law School, then her career progression through the Manhattan District Attorney's office, private practice, and federal judgeship before age forty. She reflects on mentors who guided her, a marriage that ended in divorce, and the chosen family she built from close friends and their children. This memoir reveals how America's first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice discovered her own strength and created new possibilities.
Genres: autobiography, memoir, non-fiction, biography-memoir, legal-thriller
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, overcoming-adversity, self-discovery
Setting: Bronx, Manhattan
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
302 pages · Hardcover · Knopf
Content warnings: addiction, alcohol-abuse, child-death