After taking refuge in Mexico City, Rouverol slowly re-creates new routines of family and professional life while her husband re-establishes himself as a screenwriter and director, most notably in collaboration on films with Luis Bunuel (in exile from Franco’s Spain). Rouverol offers a compelling and candid eyewitness account that takes us into her life and thoughts during her dozen years of exile: simultaneously coping with the needs of four--then five, then six--growing and inquisitive children and keeping a watchful eye out for signs that the political winds in Mexico might shift against them as they did for a few others deported on often arbitrary charges.
Thanks to the fellowship of friends such as the Dalton Trumbos, and by means of pseudonymous writing, the Butler family survived. But living in exile takes its toll in ways large and small, and perhaps the greatest strain is on her husband, whose health is compromised and who eventually dies in 1968 at age fifty-three.
