Chiquis Rivera – who lost her best friend and her mother, the legendary songstress Jenni Rivera – has released a memoir “Unstoppable: How I Found My Strength Through Love and Loss” (Atria Books, out Tuesday in English and Spanish).
Rivera, who USA Today recalls was 27 when her mother died, reflects on stepping up to support her four younger siblings: Jenicka and Johnny, who were only teens, and Jacquie and Mikey, also in their 20s at the time.
She’s gone through life guided by her mother’s strength and words, but it’s not the same as physically having her by her side.
The platform adds that when Rivera, now 36, called it quits on her marriage with Lorenzo Mendez, a former vocalist of Banda El Limón, she felt the familiar grief that engulfed her when her mother died in a plane crash in 2012. “I already had the void of not having my mom and all the pain just came together,” Rivera says. “I realized I didn’t have my mum to run to give me a hug and tell me everything is going to be okay.”
But as Rivera always says, “pain is a path to promotion.”
In “Unstoppable,” we follow Rivera’s growth going from a “nerve-rattled” singer to Latin Grammy-winning performer, from first-time business owner to full-blown entrepreneur, to finding a balance between prioritizing her family’s needs and her own, and her journey to wife – then, as she writes, “watching it all crumble before my eyes.”
Unstoppable is a continuation, as she calls it, to her 2015 memoir Forgiveness, in which she details the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father – now in prison – during childhood. It’s clear in Rivera’s new memoir that she’s much more comfortable in her skin and burning brightly despite the grief of losing her mother and leaving the man she’d believed was her life partner.
