Something Fierce

Something Fierce tells the story of six-year-old Carmen Aguirre and her younger sister who fled Chile with their parents for Canada and a life in exile soon after the violent coup of September 11, 1973 that removed Salvador Allende—the democratically elected socialist president of Chile—from office. In 1978 when the Chilean resistance issued a call for exiled activists to return to Latin America, Carmen’s mother kept her precious girls with her. As their parents set up a safe house for resistance members in Bolivia, the girls’ own double lives began. And at eighteen, Carmen herself joined the resistance.

This dramatic, darkly funny book covers the eventful decade from 1979 to 1989 and takes the reader inside war-ridden Peru, dictatorship-run Bolivia, post-Malvinas Argentina and Pinochet’s Chile. Writing with passion and deep personal insight, Aguirre captures her constant struggle to reconcile her commitment to the movement with the desires of her youth and her budding sexuality.

Something Fierce is a gripping story of love, war, and resistance and a rare first-hand account of revolutionary life.