A Jaguar and Her Daughter
Maria was an apex mama. Someone who never backed down. Ever. A mother who would kill or die for her children. Alan abused Maria for years, but when he reached for her cubs, he awakened a Guyanese jaguar.
Inspired by true events; some characters and events have been fictionalized.
My mother was 47 years-old when she gave birth to me. I was, as you’ll discover, her seventh child in a family saga that spans eight decades across two continents.
Two very different continents.
When I was growing up, my mother always struck me as someone who was not really part of this world. She moved differently from other mothers, feline and graceful, but a force of nature. In one great leap — whenever we needed it — she was always there next to us. My mother was a jaguar.
Meet the Author
Hi, I’m Tanya. In 1980, I penciled my autobiography (in cursive) at the age of eight after my father died suddenly. The loss made me, unreasonably, question how much time I had left and sparked an urgency to capture life in words. That early-worry tuned me to my sharp edges which were timid in comparison to my “older” Guyanese mother’s. With her help, over three decades, I collected her stories alongside mine, and those fragments have become the backbone of my fiction. I went on to a career in TV journalism—reporting live, producing, and telling human stories—raised two daughters, built and ran a boutique PR firm, survived an amicable divorce, remarried, and reinvented myself. Today I work in corporate marketing at Amazon, translating complex ideas into clear narratives. In my spare time, I’m answering the call I first heard as an eight-year-old, to hold time on a page. I’m currently pitching the first completed novel in a triptych—shaping my mother’s and my collected lives into fiction that honors truth while dreaming up story.
