Desire Lines is a fearless, lyric memoir-in-essays in which Kristen Millares Young excavates her matrilineage and the submerged histories of the divine feminine, blending personal narrative, mythology, and cultural critique to reclaim women's voices, maternal power, and selfhood across generations.

In her fearless debut memoir, award-winning novelist and journalist Kristen Millares Young excavates her matrilineage and the histories, myths, and silences that forge women's lives across generations.

Challenging herself to become a mother unlike those she has known, she retraces her family in diaspora from Cuba to Spain. There, she uncovers the remnants of a pagan cult whose mother goddess, Cybele, was obscured by the rise of the Virgin Mary. But Cybele was no virgin.

Blending personal narrative with mythology and cultural inquiry, Desire Lines maps the body's sacred intelligence and the relationship between struggle, estrangement, and self-determination. As Millares Young reckons with ovarian tumors, a shark, and the patriarchal forces that erase women's truths, she wields the lyric essay to awaken consciousness and reclaim the power of the divine feminine.

Desire Lines investigates the paths-of necessity, defiance, and longing-that emerge next to the routes that were planned for us. Seeking possibilities for women's liberation amid the ongoing erosion of our human rights, Millares Young centers her own body as a site of resistance and creation.