AND THE WALLS COME CRUMBLING DOWN
by Tania De Rozario
978-0999451403
$16.00 / Paperback / 5.5" x 8.5" / 144 pages
Gaudy Boy, October 1, 2020
N. America: Bookshop / Indiebound / Amazon
Distributed by Asterism & Ingram

Finalist for Lambda Literary Awards

Ms. Magazine’s October read

About

Part queer memoir and part poetic rumination, And The Walls Come Crumbling Down lays bare the love, pain, and precarity experienced by those who must forge their own home.

If home is not a building, what is it? If home is not a place, what is it? If home is not a person, what is it?

And the Walls Come Crumbling Down features a young queer woman in Singapore who is unable to find safety and refuge in her biological family or country of birth. But she insists on home. She insists on history. She refuses sanitized orderliness and linear perfection, choosing to build a life that embraces the mess and excess of human existence.

Presented in radically vulnerable fragments through a hybrid of queer memoir and poetic rumination, Tania De Rozario’s And The Walls Come Crumbling Down masterfully lays bare the love, pain, and precarity experienced by those who must forge their own home.

This edition, out for the first time in North America, is updated with a new preface from the author.

Tania De Rozario is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Tender Delirium (Math Paper Press, 2013) and Somewhere Else, Another You (Math Paper Press, 2018). Born in Singapore, she lives and works on the traditional unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, colonially known as Vancouver.

Praise

“These pages contain a series of interlocking short pieces that reach right into your guts and squeeze them, artfully and without mercy. I’m not sure how De Rozario manages to unwrap topics like abandonment, exclusion, loss, dementia, family, religion, homophobia, heartbreak, and searching for home without so much as a whiff or a sliver of sentimentality, yet she does. But there is poetry to be found here, too, and lines so beautiful I had to jot them down to be revisited later. Some of these sentences were crafted with near surgical precision, and sliced clean through the ribcage to reveal the author’s battered but still thumping heart.”
—Ivan Coyote, author of Tomboy Survival Guide

"Real estate is a perennial hot-button issue in land-scarce Singapore. Tania De Rozario ingeniously flips this subject on its head in her memoir, asking us to consider how much more it takes to create a home than bricks and mortar. Rather than orderly floor plans and the neat lines of HDB estates, we are presented with the full messiness of human existence. What makes one apartment a safe haven and another a prison? In pellucid, lyrical prose, this heart-wrenching book wanders through the rooms of its author’s memory.”
—Jeremy Tiang, author of State of Emergency

“A lyrical prose memoir that is a combination of searing emotional intensity and powerful literary evocations, it draws you close with intimate yet unsentimental disclosures, and disrupts any or all presumptions you might have about home, family and love.”
—Lydia Kwa, author of The Walking Boy