A MEMOIR BY HERNANDO CORTEZ
Fall and
Recovery
The unstable middle between losing ground and the possibility of flight.
Read the openingA life in motion. A story still unfolding.
A life beyond
the applause.
Before he knew how to trust himself, Hernando Cortez learned how to fall.
A boy training in secret, he wanted a life large enough to hold everything he was afraid to reveal. Dance carried him from Vancouver to the world’s stages with the Paul Taylor Dance Company and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project. When AIDS began taking his friends, he helped turn a community’s grief into Dancers Responding to AIDS.
But while helping others survive, he was losing himself to meth. The career he had built began to unravel. Coming home would demand more than an apology.
From the exhilaration of performance to the work of sobriety, Fall and Recovery follows a man learning to receive the care he once gave so freely. Beyond the applause, a different life waits.
The body remembers.
Dance, discipline, and the freedom of finding a place onstage.
Love asks us to stay.
Family, chosen family, and a community living through AIDS.
Recovery is lived.
The daily work of honesty, accepting help, and beginning again.
“The first fall I remember wasn’t mine.
It was my mother’s.”
Mom told me the king of Spain was coming to our house. I was eleven.
King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía of Spain were visiting the United States. Their faces appeared on our television, among the flags and official cars and people who seemed to know exactly where to stand. Mom watched, then spoke about his arrival with the same calm authority she used when telling me where the good plates were kept or how long the rice needed to sit with the lid on.
He was coming here.
I believed her.
We were a Filipino family living in a one-story house on West 46th Avenue in Vancouver. The grass grew past the edges of the yard. Every year, the cherry blossoms came back as though nothing inside our house had changed.
The front stoop held the afternoon heat. There was nothing royal about the place. Just an ordinary house on an ordinary street.
But my mother was preparing for something extraordinary.
She packed her whole wardrobe into her luggage. Dresses came out of the back of the closet. Hats and scarves appeared that looked too formal for our life. One hat had a brim she never wore to church because it felt too grand. When she shook out a scarf, her perfume rose from it, powdery and sweet. Even the bedroom seemed to be getting dressed.
— From Fall and Recovery, Chapter 1
THE CONVERSATION CONTINUES
Every story begins
with a connection.
For conversations about the memoir, publishing, interviews, or events, get in touch with Hernando.
Contact HernandoThis preliminary website was created for literary agents considering Fall and Recovery for representation.