Grace Talusan's debut memoir won two of the awards that matter most for new American writing. The Body Papers (Restless Books, 2019) took the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, which came with a ten-thousand-dollar advance and a publication contract, and the Massachusetts Center for the Book named it the state's nonfiction book of the year in 2020. The New York Times made it an Editors' Choice.

Born in the Philippines, Talusan came to the United States as a young child and grew up in the Boston suburbs. At Brandeis, where she held the Fannie Hurst writer-in-residence post, she described arriving at age two and growing up undocumented, a condition she names in the memoir with the Tagalog phrase tago ng tago, always hiding. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, taught for years at Tufts, and now teaches in the nonfiction program at Brown University.

The memoir's method is what readers remember. She builds the book out of government forms, immigration papers, medical records, and family photographs, setting documents against narrative, and uses that structure to hold difficult material: childhood sexual abuse by her grandfather, the BRCA gene and the cancer that runs in her family, and the preventive surgeries she chose. The form lets her hold the worst of it at the distance of a record.

She has been candid about why she writes. In the same conversation she offered a line that reads like a credo, that writing is power but it is also a form of love. Her short fiction has reached a wide audience too: the Boston Book Festival selected The Book of Life and Death for its 2020 One City One Story program, in an edition translated into several languages, including Tagalog.

Her subject is immigration and the undocumented experience, trauma and the body's memory of it, and the long question of who gets to feel at home. She serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and her debut remains one of the most widely honored Filipino American memoirs of recent years. For a list of living Filipino authors, Talusan is a humane and assured entry point.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.