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4,850 words · no email, no account
No. 040 · Power & Politics · World Politics
The Girl from the Garage
a biography of Imelda Remedios Visitación Romuáldez Marcos
What the book is
Before the three thousand pairs of shoes, before the chandeliered ballrooms of Malacañang, before the exile and the indictments and the long second act, there was a girl sleeping on a cot in a garage in Manila. Her father had remarried; the new household had no room for her. She sang for coins at provincial pageants and learned, early, the uses of being looked at.
Liwayway Sanchez traces the long arc from that garage to the presidential palace and beyond — the courtship by a young congressman named Ferdinand, the years of martial law, the staged tableaux of the New Society, the flight to Hawaii in 1986, and the improbable return to Philippine politics that followed. Drawing on Filipino-language sources, declassified State Department cables, and interviews with former aides and adversaries, Sanchez assembles a portrait neither caricature nor apology.
What emerges is a woman who understood, perhaps before her husband did, that power in the late twentieth century would be a matter of images: of beauty pageants and ribbon cuttings, of buildings raised in haste, of jewels photographed and then denied. Around her, a country borrowed, suffered, resisted, and remembered.
The Girl From the Garage is a study of self-invention at the scale of a nation — of how a poor relation became a first lady, how a first lady became a symbol, and what the symbol cost the people it claimed to represent.
At a glance
- Subject
- Imelda Remedios Visitación Romuáldez Marcos
- Shelf
- Power & Politics · World Politics
- Written by
- Liwayway Sanchez
- Chapters
- 19 across 210 pages
- Narrated by
- Edmund Hartley
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01The House on General SolanoRead free
- 02The Rose of Tacloban3,284 words
- 03Eleven Days3,570 words
- 04Malacanang3,177 words
- 05Proclamation 10813,640 words
- 06The Governor3,306 words
- 07The Blue Lady3,820 words
- 08The Edifice Complex3,122 words
- 09The Shoes3,227 words
- 10The Swiss Accounts3,662 words
- 11The Conjugal Dictatorship3,054 words
- 12The Tarmac3,513 words
- 13The Snap Election3,283 words
- 14The Helicopter from the Palace3,221 words
- 15The Return3,074 words
- 16The Congressman from Ilocos Norte3,000 words
- 17The Impunity3,418 words
- 18The Shoes in the Museum2,998 words
- 19The Unenforced Sentence2,486 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 210 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 210 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-028-7 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley
ISBN 979-8-90623-009-6
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Girl from the Garage about?
Imelda Remedios Visitación Romuáldez Marcos. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Girl from the Garage — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,850 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 63,000 words, 19 chapters, 210 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
