Michelle Mirabella, Translator & Editor (Spanish-English)

What opens as a story on matrescence reveals itself to be an exploration of memory, trauma, and grief—personal, familial, and national—as the protagonist, Laura, struggling in her new motherhood, revisits memories from her own daughterhood and coming of age in a home, in a country, where the adults are still living with the trauma they experienced under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.

The Cracks We Bear represents a debut for both author and translator.

Praise for The Cracks We Bear

“Catalina Infante’s rich landscape of motherhood is brought to vivid life in Michelle Mirabella’s deeply poetic translation. Not a word is wasted.”

–Anton Hur, judge for the 2025 International Booker Prize and author of Toward Eternity

“A piercing account of both motherhood and daughterhood in their ever-changing voracities and chiaroscuros. The Cracks We Bear vividly captures ‘a duplicity of the present or a simultaneity of all the presents’ inhabited by narrator Laura as she struggles to reconfigure herself postpartum and to confront her own late mother. Mirabella’s translation is keenly attuned to the pressures, losses, and longings moving through Infante’s prose: a memorable debut from both writer and translator.”

–Robin Myers, poet and translator of A Father Is Born

“Raw and incisive, Catalina Infante’s The Cracks We Bear, translated from Spanish by Michelle Mirabella, is a story of mothers, daughters, and what each must bear forward from her past. Infante’s unflinching writing, rendered by Mirabella with an exquisite sense of tension, is a tight-rope act of brutality and tenderness, grounded at all times by a fierce loyalty to what is real in motherhood. An absolutely vital English-language debut.”

–Ellene Glenn Moore, poet and award-winning author of Passage

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