In her book Loving in the War Years, Cherrie Moraga recounts her experiences and develops ideas concerning her existence as a Chicana and a lesbian in American society today, and she does so through a variety of literary forms, including short stories, poems, personal reminiscences, and essays. She states in the introduction that one of her reasons for writing this book is to preserve her culture and her life in the face of a society that is overwhelming both. At the same time, she makes the effort to reconcile a basic human conflict, that between loyalty to family and loyalty to self. As a lesbian, Moraga feels herself to be an outsider both to her family and to her societies, meaning both her Chicano society and the larger American society in which it is embedded. Her writings challenge a number of assumptions regarding the meaning of difference and the role of separateness in society.
Moraga notes that many of her students ask her what her parents think of her work: "It's as if they are hungry to know if it's possible to have both--your own life and the life of the familia" (iv). Moraga sees herself as an outsider not only because of her lesbianism but because it is the role of the writer to be an outsider. Her lesbianism also brought her to writing because her first poems were love poems. While both writing and lesbianism separate her from her family and society in so degree, she finds benefits in both:
I know with my family that even as my writing functioned to separate me from them. . . it has freed me to love them from places in myself that had before been mired in unexpressed pain. Writing has ultimately brought me back to them (v).
Moraga's relationship with her family is complex and ties directly to her sexuality and her sense of being separate as well as her need for love. She sees herself every bit as the product of her parents, and her problems with love are traced directly to the way her parents loved h...