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Love Will Save Us, Right? is a collection of eighteen essays bursting with depth, history and humor weaving together a narrative with themes of special needs parenting, neurodiversity, autism, queer family building, mental health, poverty, food insecurity, late stage capitalism, grief, and hope. Lots of hope. Partido’s words are a balance between motherly and subversive perspectives, wrapped in a promise of unyielding love. This, her first book, delivers a fun, fast read and wild heart felt ride.
The work is being called an “Essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of America’s broken promises while finding beauty in all the broken places.”– Ariel Gore, author of Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer.
Chapter 1. Hiding Poverty in the Kitchen In which the story is about struggling to make ends meet while working more than fulltime plus caregiving a loved one. This chapter highlights the panic of a ravenous adult child yelling into an open refrigerator “There is no food! Only ingredients for food!” and delivers on themes of special needs parenting, neurodiversity, mental health, poverty, and food insecurity.
Chapter 2. Garden of Troubles In which the narrative weaves together personal reflection, family secrets and American history. This chapter transports the reader to WWII Corregidor Island and Japanese American internment through open heart surgery to building an unusual family that relies on church pantry food distributions during the COVID-19 lock-down.
Chapter 3. Fear and Loathing in Rancho Tia Juana In which the memoir talks about cross-border health insurance and the inability to access mental health treatment which results in a first episode of psychosis. This chapter illustrates the trauma of a militarized border crossings, the fragility of mental health and the role of family support in a healthy recovery.
Chapter 4. The Great Resignation In which the story is rooted in mental health, nonprofit work, joining the COVID-19 Working From Home army and living through the 1988 San Francisco earthquake at the world celebrated City Lights Bookstore. This chapter involves building a parent-child relationship through video gaming and managing parental despair.
Chapter 5. Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk In which the narrative explores a Mexican-American and Irish-Polish background, the Vietnam war’s Operation Frequent Wind, generational poverty, and managing mental health. This chapter highlights self-perception, self-care, food insecurity and participating in the great resignation during COVID-19.
Chapter 6. The Other Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea In which the memoir presents a story of family fuckery, unwanted caregiving, white privilege and poverty. This chapter takes the reader to a winter in Chicago where intensive family caregiving is as unwelcome as it is difficult and unsuccessful.
Chapter 7. Tear Gas and Family Matter In which the story recounts the 1999 San Diego Pride parade where a contingent of families and children was teargassed. This chapter explores the Mexican tradition of altar building for the dead, queer history and connections to Chicago news radio.
Chapter 8. Sometimes You Need to Help Your Friends Get Rid of the Body In which the narrative explores unusual friendships and the power of quirky support. This chapter highlights loneliness as overwhelming human experience, food, family systems and mental health, the introduction of death, grief and the five stages of decomposition.
Chapter 9. Conspiracy of Fish In which the memoir weaves together a wild story of childhood fantasy, fish and fear, featuring the imagination of a seven-year old and the 1960s children’s television show Diver Dan. This chapter transports the reader back into a child’s reluctant experience of a soon to be born sibling and guilt around starting a lakefront house fire.
Chapter 10. Radical Hospitality In which the story recounts the author’s septuagenarian mother swimming the 9-mile Maui open water channel with a broken rib. This chapter celebrates mental health, coming of age with Mumford and Sons and the therapeutic use of cannabis.
Chapter 11. Heddy Lamar Invented Wi-Fi In which the narrative explores a longing for parenthood and all things babies. This chapter documents the path from considering to planning parenthood and finding a wife while forging an identity working at the renowned City Light Bookstore.
Chapter 12. Holidays and Holy Days In which the story delves into managing small and large holiday expectations, mental health and body image. This chapter juxtaposes the high of a world class Shirley MacLaine Halloween costume with the low of a bad decision to take a ten-year-old boy to a fat class on his birthday.
Chapter 13. Good Grief In which the story documents watching first responders to a motorcycle fatality and explores how it felt to receive an “autism” diagnosis for our then sixteen-year old son. This chapter is anchored in mental health and neurodiverse family perspectives.
Chapter 14. Dark Night of the Soul In which the narrative stumbles across a young person’s first, profound experience of loss, love and grief. This chapter wanders through intimate themes of fear, death and the expression of grief, while trying to maintain a robust engine of special needs parenting.
Chapter 15. Quel Fromage In which the story recounts a 1970s San Diego beatnik landmark coffee shop and two very different fathers. This chapter explores the shape of parental loss, the meaning of Ancestors and adopting the celebration of Dia de los Muertos.
Chapter 16. Blessings from the Other Side In which the memoir travels back to 1950s Campo, California while balancing family history and family trauma. This chapter meditates on creating and sharing our origin stories, the experience of loss and the shape of forgiveness.
Chapter 17. Bob Marley Wasn’t Invited Back In which the narrative uncovers the difficulty in re-entering the job market as an aging baby boomer. This chapter explores demands in the not-for-profit workforce, the great generation working at Costco and the disconnect between self-importance and anti-mattering.
Chapter 18. The Love Child of Dorothy Allison and Anne Lamott In which the story explodes with shelter insecurity, church food distributions, cannabis farming, and family cheer. This chapter involves building a sustainable and supportive community, practicing the magic of special needs parenting, preparation for loss and building a world teeming with kindness, love and acceptance.
Publication Date: October 28, 2025
DIARY OF TENT LIFE AF No. 1
I regularly count things things like cans of tuna, folded wash cloths, dogs on a leash, protest signs, and cybertrucks. It’s a calming practice that is easy to do in a check-out line at the grocery store, a stop-light, or waiting for a burger, but it’s hard to count when you’re driving behind the wheel of a car, paying attention to traffic. Not long ago, an important errand had me driving from my mom’s home in National City, California, to a location on 6th Avenue, downtown, San Diego. This uneventful sixteen-mile round trip was on California Interstate-5, exit 10 to 16B and back, viva la map nerds. I took my wife along for the ride and asked her to count as many “homeless” freeway encampments as she could see from her car window. I asked for help with this count not for calming, but because I want to know how many of my neighbors are living on this part of the 151 “city” miles of the nearly four hundred thousand state highway miles. I wonder about this a lot, especially while driving.
During that trip, my wife documented 26 northbound and 19 southbound encampments, respectively, calculating 45 sites visible from travel lanes. She reported each location consisted of one to three or more tents, and all were mixtures of blue, brown and silver tarps, pop-up and pitch tents, flat pieces of cardboard, various scraps of wood, miscellaneous umbrellas and large pieces of heavy mil plastic. I wondered how many more encampments were outside her line of site. I’d like to know because she and I also live in a tent, but ours is set up on a concrete patio in my mother’s back yard, several blocks from the freeway.
If there are actual, real-time counts of beating hearts living on interstate locations like the landscape surrounding on and off ramps, overpasses or under bridges, I haven’t seen it. I’d sure like to know how many grandparents, military vets or disabled citizens sleep in tents set up in swales, catchment areas, or erosion control slopes, cradled next to passing cars. There must have been at least one hundred persons represented in those 45 encampments. How many more beating hearts did we not see? How many people do not have a mom’s backyard to pitch a last-ditch effort to stave off homelessness? Sad emoji.
My wife and I, along with our two poorly behaved dogs, have lived in a 10’ x 12’ tent for over a year now, starting a few days before my sixty-third birthday. For us, the move was the best (and only) solution to fend off “official homelessness” after the house we rented for seven years sold for cash, within hours of being put on the market. The goodie bag from that surprise party was a ninety-day notice to vacate the premise during which time we could not find one single afford-able home to rent for ourselves, our neurodiverse young adult son and our canine companions.
By changing our housing status from sheltered renters to some of the 181,399 unhoused Californians, we have joined in laying claim to 28% of the nation’s total homeless population which I’m told is nearly a 40% increase from five years ago [Cal Matters, Marisa Kendall, January 26, 2024.] We know the number of un-housed beating hearts only because every other January, thousands of volunteers visit tents, knock on the doors of parked campers and cars and explore along creek beds and other public spaces with the goal of reckoning the state’s homeless population. This bi-annual calculation is a federal mandate for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development which in turn, conducts a “point-in-time” count of the country’s homeless to submit to the United States Congress. This number is used for things like problem solving, funding, and political commentary. I used to work for non-profits that helped count persons unhoused. Now I’m considered to be on the other side of the tally. It’s weird to be counted.
Work in process. (c) 2025 Suzette Partido
Previously published work (now out of print)
Some Weird Sin, limited edition by Rex Ray & Wayne Smith Dear World, Queer Art & Lit, edited by Camille Roy & Nayland Blake Discontents, New Queer Writers, edited by Dennis Cooper, Amethyst Press High Risk 2, Writings on Sex, Death, & Subversion, edited by Amy Scholder & Ira Silverberg, Plume
